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CERN To Tap Unused Desktop Power To Help Find Higgs Boson

Posted by samzenpus on from the god-particle-the-home-game dept.

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"

9 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. default by alex_guy_CA · · Score: 2

    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
    1. Re:default by piripiri · · Score: 5, Informative

      *@home uses processing power. Processing power uses electricity. Electricity costs money.

    2. Re:default by blair1q · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Only if they also create a portal to the deposit window at my bank and start pumping their profits into it.

      I only work for free when I enable it.

    3. Re:default by vux984 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

      Those @home projects cost between roughly $3 and $30/month per unit to run depending on what equipment you are using (celeron laptop vs i7 gaming rig vs ps3 vs old pentium 4 vs SLI GPUs...) , what the electricity rates are, and whether you end up running running air conditioning more to offset the extra heat you are unknowingly generating.

      Me... I have 4 computers always on, but I live in a cooler part of Canada where the heat isn't a huge problem and the electricity is pretty cheap... but they are performance oriented hardware and it would still cost me over $25/month to run @home on all 4.

      In some American state's and several european countries electricity is triple or quadruple what I pay. And the extra heat would have to be countered by running the air conditioning more in some places. (In others it might let you run the heater less).

      But the point is, there is a very real hidden cost to this stuff, and without full disclosure of the actual cost, these projects are a bit offensive to me.

      I have no issue with someone running the software with informed consent, but the true value in dollars that is actually being contributed unwittingly on these projects is appalling.

      They are often installed by "kids" or "employees" who do not know the cost, and do not pay it. And the cost is passed on to the parent or employer who have little ability to detect it... its not like a line item on their credit card. Its just a higher kwH reading which is pretty inscrutable.

      Preinstalled and enabled by the manufacturers would be tantamount to theft. Why not just subscribe them to World of Warcraft and AOL, and then roll the monthly charges into their property taxes lump sum assessement? Its about as honest.

  2. Looks good, but... by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Looks good, but... by Temkin · · Score: 4, Informative

      Has to run as a privileged user... That's the show stopper for me. Clearly, someone hasn't done their homework. So I'm afraid I will not be joining.

  3. Re:Save the Planet! by arth1 · · Score: 3, Funny

    If we find a single Higgs Boson, it will be.

    If we find a married one, it would be even more awesome.

  4. Re:Save the Planet! by jfengel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You don't really find a single Higgs boson. You can't detect the Higgs directly. You have to detect its decay processes (usually, a pair of taus or photons), which can also be produced by other processes. You find it statistically: if you get more of those pairs than is accounted for by understood processes, and if the amount of the excess corresponds to the mount of excesses you'd expect from the Higgs, AND if the machine is running at an energy that you'd expect to produce the Higgs, you get to call it a detection.

    So you can count up how many Higgs events you thought there were, and then repeat the experiments focusing on the energy range you think the Higgs has. So, it's not quite the "eureka" moment you might hope for, but it's good enough to confirm the Standard Model.

    Whether all of that was really "worth it"... well, that's something else altogether.

  5. Re:Another @home project? by jovius · · Score: 2

    LHC@home has been around for years (They used to run simulations but the project wasn't awfully active in the construction phase).

    There are actually multitude of projects available.

    http://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

    That list doesn't include projects like http://renderfarm.fi/ and probably many others.