LHC@Home Attracts Large Support

I mentioned this a while back. It appears that a lot of people are eager to participate in the distributive computing effort to do a lot of simulations for the LHC. Since its announcement, the LHC@Home has received a lot of support.

The application Test4Theory, which runs Monte Carlo simulations of events in the LHC, was announced in a CERN press release on 8 August. Within three days, the number of registered volunteers swelled from a few hundred to nearly 8000.

Certainly nothing to sneeze at. Still, they're expecting 40,000 participants in this project, and that will result in an interesting consequence:

According to CERN's Peter Skands, the physicist leading the simulation effort, when the number of active volunteers passes 40,000 – which could happen later this year – the system will become equivalent to a true "virtual collider", producing as many collisions per second as the real LHC.

Fire away!

Zz.