LHC@home: Test4Theory

The Test4Theory project is going to migrate from the current CERN "VMwrapper" to the new "vboxwrapper" developed and supported by the official BOINC development team. After extensive debugging and beta-testing, we believe the latest vboxwrapper version 0.14 is ready for adoption. As the final step before full migration, we now encourage all volunteers (with BOINC client versions 6.12 or later, and VirtualBox versions v4.2.8 or higher) to begin using the new wrapper. To do this, click "Your account" on the T4T project home page, go to "Test4Theory preferences", select "Edit Test4Theory preferences" and check the box beside the option "Run test applications?", then press the "Update preferences" button. Your subsequent work units will use the new wrapper. Some important differences you will notice: - HEADLESS MODE: Your VM will run without a console window, but you can view its console via an RDP client by pressing the new button "Show VM Console" appearing in the BOINC manager GUI for a running Test4Theory Task. Non-Windows users can download and install a free RDP client such as CoRD for Mac OS X, or FreeRDP for Linux. The control keys Alt-Fx select the same alternative console screens as before. (NOTE: "Show VM Console" will only work after you install the VirtualBox Extension Pack for your version of VirtualBox. Remember to quit BOINC before you update VirtualBox or the Extension Pack). - GRAPHICS: Another new GUI button "Show graphics" is provided to view the graphics and log output from the VM, using any up to date browser version (including Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 or Safari 6). A window of your default browser will be automatically used. - MAC SANDBOXING: Mac OS X users no longer need to run the "Mac enabling script" after updating the BOINC client. - SINGLE CPU ONLY: For the moment only single-CPU operation is supported. - VM CPU THROTTLING: This is supported via your local/global BOINC CPU preferences, not T4T project preferences. Please give any feedback using this News thread "Migration to new BOINC wrapper", or the Number crunching thread "Testing new wrapper". Thanks to all, The team

We are happy to announce that user Frank is our first 10-time Billionaire. He has processed over 10 billion Monte Carlo events and is still heading our T4T leaderboard for events and jobs run: http://www.citizencyberscience.net/t4t-webapp/stats/ Note that we have a new champion for CPU time, user gsancosme - so bravo to him too! Congratulations to our champions and thanks to all our other volunteers! The Team

Dear all, We are really happy to announce that the 22-23 April 2013 there will be a Citizen Cyberscience Workshop at University of Geneva and several of the researchers and developers of the project will participate. The venue of the event is: Université de Genève, Campus Battelle (Route de Drize 7, Carouge), Building D, auditoire D185 (This course is part of a series supported by the Conférence Universitaire de Suisse Occidentale) What is this course about? This course introduces in a hands-on way a variety of approaches to doing online citizen science, including volunteer computing, volunteer thinking and volunteer sensing. It explores the contributions and the motivations of the volunteers who participate in such projects, as well as the sort of scientific and social impact that these projects are having. Who should join it? Basically, anyone with an interest in online citizen science. Including but not restricted to: computer science and computer engineering students who want to learn about the latest trends in open source tools for browser-based science; science students who are developing or want to develop apps for the general public to participate in their research; human-machine interface researchers interested in games with a scientific purpose; social scientists studying online social networks and communities. What will be achieved? As part of the course, the goal for the students will be to work in teams to design and implement a first mock-up or working prototype of an online citizen science project. Participants can bring their own project proposals, or work on existing projects in areas such as bioscience, nanotechnology, particle physics and psychology. Participants will use HTML5 tools (Javascript, Python…) to build browser-based apps and open source platforms for mobile-phone-based data collection (Epicollect), pattern recognition, transcription and digitization (Crowdcrafting), and virtualization of computing tasks (CernVM). Detailed Programme How to register? Registration is free!!

The server migration is done, and the project is now running on the latest BOINC server software. If you should run into problems, we recommend to detach and re-attach to the project. Thanks for your collaboration and happy crunching! The team.

Please note that a server migration is on going and that it will take some time before the service is restored. Thanks for your contributions to LHC@home! The team

There will be a server interruption for the Test4Theory project this afternoon from 1PM UTC, due to a migration of the BOINC server. The BOINC server and message boards will not be available during this operation. As the copying of files take a long time, we do not expect the server to be up before 20pm UTC or later. All jobs under the VMs should continue running like usual. Thanks for your understanding and thanks again for contributing to LHC@home! The team.

In order to update the server software, there will be a short interruption today. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your contributions. The team.

We now recommend volunteers to upgrade to the latest version of VirtualBox (4.2.8). (The bug introduced in version 4.2.6, affecting Beta testers using the new wrapper, is fixed in 4.2.8). The team

The CERN servers have now been successfully restarted and all VM's should resume job processing automatically. No user intervention is needed. Thanks for your patience, The team

Since about noon on Saturday (Geneva time) there have been problems with the CERN central servers which can prevent T4T virtual machines from getting and returning jobs. These are being caused by power supply interventions at CERN over the weekend so please be patient! Thanks to all our volunteers, The T4T team

The MCPlots server is running again since some hours and the jobs backlog is being slowly cleared up. It is not yet clear whether a likely hardware problem has been corrected so the problem may recur. Stay tuned, The team

The CERN server mcplots-dev has been down since yesterday (Feb. 16th) with a hardware problem. We will try and fix this as soon as possible starting tomorrow. This machine distributes to volunteer VMs all the jobs from the T4T scientists and handles their outputs. While it is down, jobs currently executing in volunteer VMs will run to completion but the VMs will then wait to upload their results and get new jobs. BOINC credit will continue to be earned but no MCPlots credit or statistics will be available. We will update this news item when the problem is fixed. Thanks for your patience! The team

In conjunction with [url=http://www.earthday.org/2012]Earth Day 2012[/url] World Community Grid is pleased to announce the launch of the [url=http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewNewsArticle.do?articleId=198]Computing for Sustainable Water[/url] project! This project is run by the researchers at The University of Virginia, USA. For more information on this project, please ...

Because of the recent discovery and exhaustion of the search range, current iteration of Sophie Germain project is being finished. No new work will be inserted, and only some resends for unfinished work will be issued. There are plans to restart Sophie Germain search in the future: we are evaluating best approach to the problem at the moment. If you have opted only into Sophie Germain project, we suggest revising your project preferences and selecting other projects so that you keep receiving work.

On 19 Apr 2012, 21:12:27 UTC, PrimeGrid’s Generalized Fermat Prime Search, through PRPNet, found the mega prime: 773620^262144+1 The prime is 1,543,643 digits long and enters Chris Caldwell's “The Largest Known Primes Database” ranked 2nd for Generalized Fermat primes and 22nd overall. The discovery was made by Senji Yamashita of Japan using an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 in an Intel Core i7-970 @ 3.20GHz system with 6GB RAM, running Windows 7 Professional x64. This GPU took about 47 minutes to probable prime (PRP) test with GenefCUDA. Senji is a member of the PrimeSearchTeam. For more details, please see the official announcement.

We had to cancel these WUs on-the-fly. fragxa3 were 10 times longer by mistake and would not have finished in most computers. On Monday we will look into compensating who was affected by this. Sorry for the inconvenience. gdf

IBM World Community Grid has launched a new application, Computing for Sustainable Water, enabling researchers at the University of Virginia to study the effects of human activity on large watersheds.

Next week six new graduate students will start their projects on Leiden Classical. Furthermore, a paper on the results of the phonon model (for which we used this BOINC project) has been submitted to the Journal of Chemical Physics. Hopefully it will be accepted.

We are submitting a new batch of WUs (~1000) of our beloved trypsin and benzamidine system for a beautiful experiment in collaboration with a crystallographer. It seems that these crystallographers and us may have got to similar conclusions on how trypsin and benzamidine like to interact. The nice thing is that we'd have got to the conclusions from VERY different approaches. They make crystals of trypsin/benzamidine and take pictures of their structures using a synchrotron and we make MD simulations of already solved structures and take many snapshots of what happened. And then we compare them. If experimentalists (protein crystallographers in this case) are able to reproduce what we obtained from computer simulations or viceversa, it would be a beautiful (and necessary) validation of our methods. Let's hope that all goes well. Cheers!

On 9 April 2012 6:31:14 UTC, PrimeGrid’s Sophie Germain Prime Search found a World Record Sophie Germain prime: 18543637900515*2^666667-1 (2p+1: 18543637900515*2^666668-1) The prime is 200,701 digits long, eclipsing the previous record of 79,911 digits. It enters Chris Caldwell's “The Largest Known Primes Database” ranked 1st for Sophie Germain primes. The discovery was made by Philipp Bliedung (pabliedung) of the United States using an Intel Core i7 950 @ 3.07GHz with 12 GB RAM running Linux. Philipp is a member of the USA team. The prime was verified on 9 April 2012 9:36:15 UTC, by Lee Blyth (IshtarIS) of Australia using an Intel Core i7 2600k @ 3.40GHz with 8 GB RAM running Windows 7 Ultimate. Lee is a member of the Ishtar team. For more details, please see the official announcement.