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CERN To Tap Unused Desktop Power To Help Find Higgs Boson
hypnosec writes "Research institute CERN has launched a new project to tap into the extra computing power from the public for its Large Hadron Collider atom smashing project. According to the organization, the LHC@home project will, for the first time, allow volunteers to aid in high-energy collisions of protons in CERN's Large Hadron Collider and in turn helping physicists to unravel the mysteries of the origin of the universe"
Am I the only one who thinks programs like this and/or folding@home and/or seti@home should be installed by the manufacture and enabled by default?
San Francisco Photographers
That's one of the things that's awesome about F@H. :)
Totally useless, yes, but they're still fun statistics.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
This is a way more productive use of computing power
This will prevent PCs worldwide from sleeping, thus requiring new fossil-fuel power plants to be brought online, thus accelerating global warming, thus destroying the Earth.
I hope it's worth it.
Have to use Oracle VirtualBox? Have to run with 32-bit compatibility libraries? Sorry, those are showstoppers.
Let me run it in the sandbox of my choice, and I'll invest electricity in running this. Otherwise, no.
While I see that it will be running BOINC, will it be one of the CUDA/OPENCL running variants?
pay for by burns power co! You Nuclear friend
Scientists like you should be locked up.
Finding the Higgs is not worth anything, if the planet goes bust, especially since there is no plan B, say a Mars colony or transmitting the find or our genome to aliens(like in Species: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_(film) ).
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Do they really expect that many people to take part? There is already SETI@Home, Folding@Home, and a few others I can't think of ATM. IMO Folding@home is most useful of these (huge potential medical usefulness), so they've got that down, and SETI is, well, kinda cool. I can understand if you're a huge physics buff, but I don't know too many people like that. And I'm not sure why you want to do simulations of particle collisions when you can do the real thing and get real results.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
This should be a seriously distant second to any similar projects in the medical sector (i.e., Folding@Home). Yes, this stuff could result in things like superconductors or the holy grail of sustainable power-producing nuclear fusion. Maybe. Someday. A far distant third place would be helping to find alien civilizations (Don Henley: "They're not here, they're not coming").
massive power afforded to it by desktops across the globe, CERN may finally break-down and ask its wife, who will most certainly know where the higgs boson was the last time she saw it in multidimensional timespace.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Seriously. When I see something called LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at Home, I want hadron-smashing hardware, not some lame piece of software.
That would be pretty awesome to see. Hopefully they'll use one of those Compaq computers from the late 80's. They had a steel chassis and were heavy as hell. Throw one in with an Osborne Luggable. If you accelerate those bad boys to the speed of light & smash 'em together, any spare Higgs Bosons stuck inside will be sure to come flying out.
Teh Higgs!
I always find it funny that the same folks who are advocating stuff like this are also advocating using less power at home. I think organizations that are going to ask folks to engage in distributed computing projects should be required to meed some equivalent carbon footprint goals (carbon credits or whatever) as they would if they were doing the same level of processing in their own data center.
in the stove!
HO HO! It's hidin' in the stove, eh?
is now suspected to be in a PC at home!
They're just SAYING they're looking for the Higgs. But what they're actually trying to do is corner the world BitCoin market! With the U.S's Credit Rating being downgraded they're anticipating BitCoin becoming the new international currency standard.
Time's fun when you're having flies. - Kermit the Frog
So for the peace of mind of some theorist we need to churn fossil fuels? And who is going to pay for the kwh?
I an not a fan of this type of activities..
So, I went through and installed all the software, click add project, LHC@home. Lo and behold:
"This project is not currently accepting new accounts. You can add it only if you have an account."
I feel alienated. How does this help ... anyone? Weird. Uninstalled.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Great, a bright flash, a 60KT equivalent explosion, and a gate opens up from another world!
Someone call John Ringo.. :)
Of course this question would probably be better directed to one of the CERN folks, but...
Apparently the apps which actually do the work use a Scientific Linux base system with a bunch of software installed, and they don't want to try to port this whole stack so they're having people use VirtualBox and a VM image. But what about people who are already using Scientific Linux, people who'd be willing to run SL, or people who would be interested in dedicating a machine to the task? Wouldn't the speedups involved in removing the VM layer be significant enough to merit allowing this option?
(In addition, that would make it much simpler if they wanted to utilize GPGPU type resources in the future, since using a GPU under a VM can be pretty painful.)
I bet they could find it easy with a super-powerful Higgs-Boson powered quantum computer.
I'd love to help them out (as I look at 6 cores sitting idle right now), but I just won't do VirtualBox.
--Rob
I used to run a couple of the distributed computing programs years back, but I don't anymore. The main reason is that computers have advanced. 10 years ago, a computer sitting idle and a computer under a heavy work load used almost the same amount of power. Therefore, as long as your were going to leave the computer on anyway, it didn't hurt to run one of these programs. However, newer CPUs use much less power when they are idle compared to running a heavy work load. I wish CERN the best of luck, but it seems like the whole distributed computing idea is starting to come to a close due to increased power efficiency.
I mean, how much did this thing cost? $9 billion? And it was way over budget. They couldn't add one or two supercomputers?
Plus, it's an ugly experiment to begin with. Just throwing more and more energy at it to see if there might be a glimpse of a particle that might or might not exist. And if we don't find it, we won't even know for sure it doesn't exist. There's no beauty in it.
because it doesn't exist. Gravity is due to the same thing that creates interference probability amplitude wave interference, divergence of the universe into copies of itself. I even have the mathematics to prove it:
e^(X/L) ~= sum {n=0 to N} ( C(X,n) * (1/L^n) )
(1/2) * || a + ib ||^2 ~= C(a,2) + C(b,2)
Right there. That PROVES that the Higgs does not exist. All of the strangeness of quantum mechanics is due to particle collisions, where each "particle" is a copy of our universe.