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The Large Hadron Collider team will be tapping into the collective computing
power of the public to help it simulate particle physics experiments.
Among other pursuits, the effort could help uncover the Higgs boson.
The effort, dubbed LHC@home 2.0, is a vastly updated version of a 2004 effort
to enlist the public's computers to simulate beams of protons.
Advances in home computers now allow simulations of the enormously more complex
particle collisions themselves.
The LHC facility is the world's most powerful "atom smasher", occupying an
underground, 27km ring beneath the Swiss-French border.
"Volunteers can now actively help physicists in the search for new fundamental
particles that will provide insights into the origin of our Universe, by
contributing spare computing power from their personal computers and laptops,"
read a statement from Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research
which runs the LHC.
'Fundamental principles'
Along with the grandeur of the accelerator itself came an unprecedented
computing infrastructure to handle the 15 million gigabytes of data produced at
the LHC each year.
The Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid is a 100m-euro network
designed to handle the flood of data and distribute it to scientists worldwide.
The LHC@home project will complement this network by splitting up the
gargantuan task of simulating the collisions, feeding those computer
simulations back to the scientists for comparison.
"By looking for discrepancies between the simulations and the data, we are
searching for any sign of disagreement between the current theories and the
physical Universe," says the LHC@home 2.0 website.
"Ultimately, such a disagreement could lead us to the discovery of new
phenomena, which may be associated with new fundamental principles of nature."
The project is just the latest in an increasingly long line of "citizen
science" projects in which the power of the public's home computers is put to
use in solving scientific problems; the search for extra-terrestrial
intelligence and the fabulously complex process of protein folding are both
subjects of such distributed computing projects.