https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201921403016
Extending CERN computing to volunteers - LHC@home consolidation and outlook
1
Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Oslo ;
Norway
2
CERN, Geneva,
Switzerland
3
University of Patras,
Greece
* email: david.cameron@cern.ch
** email: laurencefield@cern.ch
*** email: nils.hoimyr@cern.ch
Published online: 17 September 2019
LHC@home has provided computing capacity for simulations under BOINC since 2005. Following the introduction of virtualisation with BOINC to run HEP Linux software in a virtual machine on volunteer desktops, initially started on test BOINC projects, like Test4Theory and ATLAS@home, all CERN applications distributed to volunteers have been consolidated under a single LHC@home BOINC project. As part of an effort to unite CERN’s batch, cloud, grid and volunteer computing efforts, the BOINC service has been integrated with the other compute services at CERN, notably HTCondor, in terms job submission and accounting. The paper will also address contributions to improve the BOINC software and community effort to evolve BOINC for a sustainable volunteer computing environment. Furthermore, we discuss future challenges to reduce the effort required by volunteers to run virtual machines for experiment simulations and improvements to BOINC to widen the appeal of volunteer computing.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
