Towards a Production Volunteer Computing Infrastructure for HEP

Following the successful inclusion of virtualisation to volunteer computing for theory simulations back in 2011, the use of volunteer computing with BOINC and CernVM has been extended to cover simulations for the LHC experiments ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. This paper describes the status of the BOINC volunteer computing platform at CERN used for LHC@home and how it has been designed to address a heterogeneous environment of different user communities with different computing infrastructure. The aim of the recent developments is to provide a volunteer computing platform that the experiments can build upon to exploit opportunistic resources. Furthermore, new developments of common solutions to span user authentication domains are explained

Self-service for software development projects and HPC activities

This contribution describes how CERN has implemented several essential tools for agile software development processes, ranging from version control (Git) to issue tracking (Jira) and documentation (Wikis). Running such services in a large organisation like CERN requires many administrative actions both by users and service providers, such as creating software projects, managing access rights, users and groups, and performing tool-specific customisation. Dealing with these requests manually would be a time-consuming task. Another area of our CERN computing services that has required dedicated manual support has been clusters for specific user communities with special needs. Our aim is to move all our services to a layered approach, with server infrastructure running on the internal cloud computing infrastructure at CERN. This contribution illustrates how we plan to optimise the management of our of services by means of an end-user facing platform acting as a portal into all the related services for software projects, inspired by popular portals for open-source developments such as Sourceforge, GitHub and others. Furthermore, the contribution will discuss recent activities with tests and evaluations of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications on different hardware and software stacks, and plans to offer a dynamically scalable HPC service at CERN, based on affordable hardware

LHC@Home: A Volunteer computing system for Massive Numerical Simulations of Beam Dynamics and High Energy Physics Events

Recently, the LHC@home system has been revived at CERN. It is a volunteer computing system based on BOINC which boosts the available CPU-power in institutional computer centres with the help of individuals that donate the CPU-time of their PCs. Currently two projects are hosted on the system, namely SixTrack and Test4Theory. The first is aimed at performing beam dynamics simulations, while the latter deals with the simulation of high-energy events. In this paper the details of the global system, as well a discussion of the capabilities of each project will be presented

BOINC service for volunteer cloud computing

Since a couple of years, a team at CERN and partners from the Citizen Cyberscience Centre (CCC) have been working on a project that enables general physics simulation programs to run in a virtual machine on volunteer PCs around the world. The project uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) framework. Based on CERNVM and the job management framework Co-Pilot, this project was made available for public beta-testing in August 2011 with Monte Carlo simulations of LHC physics under the name "LHC@home 2.0" and the BOINC project: "Test4Theory". At the same time, CERN's efforts on Volunteer Computing for LHC machine studies have been intensified; this project has previously been known as LHC@home, and has been running the "Sixtrack" beam dynamics application for the LHC accelerator, using a classic BOINC framework without virtual machines. CERN-IT has set up a BOINC server cluster, and has provided and supported the BOINC infrastructure for both projects. CERN intends to evolve the setup into a generic BOINC application service that will allow scientists and engineers at CERN to profit from volunteer computing. This paper describes the experience with the two different approaches to volunteer computing as well as the status and outlook of a general BOINC service

SixTrack V and runtime environment

SixTrack is a single-particle tracking code for high-energy circular accelerators routinely used at CERN for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), its luminosity upgrade (HL-LHC), the Future Circular Collider (FCC) and the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) simulations. The code is based on a 6D symplectic tracking engine, which is optimized for long-term tracking simulations and delivers fully reproducible results on several platforms. It also includes multiple scattering engines for beam–matter interaction studies, as well as facilities to run the integrated simulations with external particle matter interaction codes. These features differentiate SixTrack from general-purpose, optics-design software. The code recently underwent a major restructuring to merge the advanced features into a single branch, such as multiple ion species, interface with external codes and high-performance input/output. This restructuring also removed a large number of compilation flags, instead enabling/disabling the functionality with runtime options. In the process, the code was moved from Fortran 77 to Fortran 2018 standard, also allowing and achieving a better modularization. Physics models (beam–beam effects, Radio-Frequency (RF) multipoles, current carrying wires, solenoid and electron lenses) and methods (symplecticity check) have also been reviewed and refined to offer more accurate results. The SixDesk runtime environment allows the user to manage the large batches of simulations required for accurate predictions of the dynamic aperture. SixDesk supports several cluster environments available at CERN as well as submitting jobs to the LHC@Home volunteering computing project, which enables volunteers contributing with their hardware to CERN simulation. SixTrackLib is a new library aimed at providing a portable and flexible tracking engine for single- and multi-particle problems using the models and formalism of SixTrack. The library is able to run in CPUs as well as graphical processing units (GPUs). This contribution presents the status of the code, summarizes the main existing features and provides details about the main development lines SixTrack, SixDesk and SixTrackLib

LHC@Home: A BOINC-based Volunteer Computing Infrastructure for Physics Studies at CERN

Copyright © by the paper's authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. The LHC@Home 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. 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 LHC@Home BOINC project. This paper addresses the challenges related with 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 LHC@Home service. Thanks to the computing power provided by volunteers joining LHC@Home, numerous accelerator beam physics studies have been carried out, allowing for improving the understanding of charged particle dynamics in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its future upgrades. The main results are highlighted in this paper