![]() This development has allowed the LHC experiment collaborations to run their simulations also under BOINC, in the CernVM virtual machine. This use of virtualisation under BOINC was pioneered by the Test4Theory project during 2008-2011. Thanks to developments started at CERN, and later brought into the BOINC distribution, such Linux programs can now run on a Virtual Machine (VM) distributed to the volunteer computers via BOINC and running on volunteer PCs within the Oracle VirtualBox hypervisor. Note that most HEP codes, such as the analysis frameworks of the LHC experiments, run almost exclusively under the Linux operating system and are therefore run in virtual machines as described below. However, as applications running under BOINC had to be compiled for each and every possible client operating system, only the SixTrack application was ported to Windows, Linux and later MacOSX clients. started off with the accelerator code SixTrack, which had been successively ported from mainframe to supercomputer to emulator farms and PCs, and later on a gas detector simulation program. Thus, volunteer computing has been used successfully at CERN since 2004 with the project, and has provided additional computing power for CPU-intensive applications with small data sets, as well as an outreach channel for CERN activities. It was then proposed to use the BOINC infrastructure to extend the potential usage worldwide. Instead, an informal project, Compact Physics ScreenSaver (CPSS), was established to attempt to use the several thousand Windows desktop PCs at CERN during nights and weekends when otherwise idle. Neither the PlayStation 2 nor 3, however, provided IEEE 754 compliant double precision floating-point arithmetic which was, and is, considered essential for most CERN applications. ![]() In 2002, as part of the ongoing search for ever better price-performance ratio computing, as CERN had moved from mainframes to workstations and then PCs, an article on the use of PlayStations suggested the use of even lower cost alternatives. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 5. A detailed analysis of the SixTrack case is provided in Section 4, covering the current studies (see Section 4.1) the performance analysis (see Section 4.2) and an outlook on future applications (see Section 4.3). The structure of the paper is the following: in Section 2 an overview of the BOINC project is given, while the detail and specfficities of the various applications running under are given in Section 3, with separate sections, from 3.1 to 3.5, to cover the various applications. Today, active BOINC projects together harness about 7.5 Petaflops of computing power, covering a wide range of physical application, and also particle physics communities can benefit from these resources of donated simulation capacity. The motivation for bringing LHC computing under the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is that available computing resources at CERN and in the HEP community are not sufficient to cover the needs for numerical simulation capacity. This paper addresses the use of volunteer computing at CERN, and its integration with Grid infrastructure and applications in High Energy Physics (HEP). The main results are highlighted in this paper. ![]() Thanks to the computing power provided by volunteers joining numerous accelerator beam physics studies have been carried out, yielding an improved understanding of charged particle dynamics in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its future upgrades. This paper addresses the challenges related to traditional and virtualized applications in the BOINC environment, and how volunteer computing has been integrated into the overall computing strategy of the laboratory through the consolidated service. The traditional CERN accelerator physics simulation code SixTrack enjoys continuing volunteers support, and thanks to virtualisation a number of applications from the LHC experiment collaborations and particle theory groups have joined the consolidated BOINC project. ![]() The BOINC project has provided computing capacity for numerical simulations to researchers at CERN since 2004, and has since 2011 been expanded with a wider range of applications.
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