Kirk Pearson's Weblog

Help Design CERN's Large Hadron Collider

Coinciding with CERN's 50th anniversary today, the LHC@home distributed computing project has opened to public participation. This project will help CERN design a stable particle beam for its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. The project uses a software client, based on the BOINC distributed computing platform, to simulate the path of a group of particles around the LHC ring. The client is available for Linux and Windows now, and will be available on other platforms in the future. Since the public will not be able to help analyze the 15 Petabytes of data the LHC will generate each year, LHC@home is a great way for people to participate in the LHC project.