Tag Archives: Large Hadron Collider

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LHC@home 2.0 accepting new accounts

A simulated event in the CMS detector, a colli...

Image via Wikipedia

I blogged about LHC@home 2.0, aka Test4Theory@home, about a month ago. The project had just been moved from invitation-only alpha testing to the first stage of beta testing. Response from would-be participants was literally overwhelming (it exceeded system capacity in under 48 hours), with new accounts being created at a rate that must have warmed the cockles of many more hearts than just this battered and cynical old one. Which, despite snarky comments from the SO, is certified healthy. That’s what drinking in moderation, not smoking, eating (mostly) proper meals and doing sport, all the while having loads of fun, does for you.

Anyway, this little bit of good news popped up in the BOINC client this week:

We’ve recovered from the initial tsunami of volunteer support last month – thanks, everyone, for your enthusiasm and patience! So now Test4Theory is opening gradually to new volunteers using invitation codes.

If you want to test the project, please, sign up for an invite!

If the number of requests remains very high, we won’t be able to accommodate everyone, so we’ll be picking users randomly each week and sending them invitation codes – an invitation lottery. Thus, if you want to try the project and help debugging it sign up and good luck!

So if you’re interested in joining the hunt for answers to the unsolved mysteries of particle physics, now’s your chance. Feel free to join the team.

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Video of the day: A wonderful and significant story

Of course it went viral. Anything musical that includes Morgan Freeman, Stephen Hawking and the Large Hadron Collider has got to be good. All the rest is just Awesome Overload. From the description:

A musical investigation into the nature of atoms and subatomic particles, the jiggly things that make up everything we see. Featuring Morgan Freeman, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Cox, Richard Feynman, and Frank Close.

What, no ladies? Come on. That complaint aside, this is beautiful and inspiring. And possibly the only possible justification in the whole universe for the existence of autotune.

Watch video

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Party time for particles: LHC@home 2.0

A simulated event in the CMS detector, a colli...

Image via Wikipedia

LHC@home 2.0 is an extension of the LHC@home platform, launched in 2004 to help physicists simulate protons beam dynamics in the LHC. At that time, doing full-fledged simulations of particle collisions was beyond the scope of volunteer computing. So LHC@home was used to calculate the positioning of various types of magnet along the circumference of the monster boson-botherer, including the ginormous 35-tonne superconducting dipole magnets (1,232 of them, placed and tested one at a friggin’ time).

What is the LHC going to be used for? Seriously badass physics, viz.:

  • To find out if the Higgs boson exists and can be detected;
  • Look for supersymmetric particles;
  • Try to make sense of the whole matter/antimatter puzzle (antimatter isn’t a perfect reflection of matter and there’s far less antimatter than matter, but no-one knows why);
  • Serendipity.

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