LHC@home: Test4Theory

Dear all, A few months ago we asked you for opinions on ways to combine projects like T4T with online learning. Your feedback was really useful for preparing a funding proposal on this theme, and it's a pleasure to announce that the proposed project, called Citizen Cyberlab, has been accepted by the European Commission. The project will involve a number of institutions in London, Paris and Geneva, including CERN – you can read more about it in the first comment of this post. A specific goal for CERN in the project will be to build an educational game based on LHC@home. The project should start by the end of this year. However, we plan to start improving the links between LHC@home and online education already this summer, in a collaboration between Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) and the Citizen Cyberscience Centre. I look forward to telling you more about that when the project kicks off in June. Best Regards, The team!

Dear all, We have just deployed a new revision of the current Virtual Machine 2.5.1-3-1.1 that should improve the stability of the system and reduce the errors with the floppy device. The queue has right now new WUs with this VM, so you will get it in the next few days. Best regards, The team

Dear all, As a joint effort of the Test4Theory team and the P2P University, we are glad to announce that we have created the first challenge to help people to become a volunteer in scientific projects thanks to BOINC. The challenge has three tasks, and gives the opportunity to everyone to learn how you can from your home be part of the scientific community, joining different projects and solving easy tasks (installing BOINC, posting your first credits, etc.) This first challenge will help other people to join any BOINC project. The next step will be the creation of a specific challenge to join Test4Theory, as this research project is a bit more complicated due to we need to install VirtualBox. If you want to help us in getting more people involved in this project, as well as in the BOINC community, don't hesitate and join the P2P Test4Theory study group, and help us creating new challenges, mentoring new users, etc. As usual any comments and feedback are welcome! Best regards, The team! Update: The P2PUniversity has a blog post about the challenge :)

Dear all, Today we have released a new version of the wrapper, that restores the previous 7.05 version behavior for pausing/saving the VM. This new release does not abort the VM after 10 failed tries to suspend or save the VM. The previous 7.05 behavior has been restored, but the log file will be populated with 7.06 messages. If you were suffering errors from the previous wrapper, you should get the new one asking for a new WU. Best regards, The team

Dear all, We are happy to announce that this week the project Test4Theory will be present in the 2nd Citizen Cyberscience Summit in London. Dr. Ben Segal will be presenting the project and the status in a panel session about volunteer computing this Friday afternoon (check the details of the program!) And on Saturday there will be a hackday around citizen cyberscience, with one special challenge for LHC@Home. As many of you know, we have created a study group in the P2P University, and we will be inviting people from the summit to join us to create some courses/challenges for this study group. The first courses/challenges could be about how a person can join a BOINC project, with special focus for LHC@Home (Sixtrack and Test4Theory), the requirements, how you can check the results, etc. If you are in London and want to participate, just register (there are only 36 tickets left!) and join us to create some courses/challenges for LHC@Home study group. Best regards, The team! UPDATE You can watch online the talks, check this broadcast tomorrow morning!.

Dear all, We are happy to announce that thanks to your reports and feedback, you discovered a bug in the wrapper, and now has been fixed. The bug was causing that some VMs were not paused or saved even though the command was issued. The new bug fix released today should solve this problem, as it will check for 10 times if the VM is paused or saved before moving to the next step. If after 10 times it has not been possible to pause or save the VM, the WU will be aborted, as for some reason the VM is not responding. You will get the new wrapper version when your computer finishes your current WU. Best regards, The team!

Dear all, Yesterday and today we have had some power cuts at CERN caused in most cases by the bad weather that we are having these days. The systems are back and running again normally, however, we may suffer again some disruptions due to the weather. Just look at these photos from two days ago! (Thanks to the Flickr community) Check the full album!! The photos are impressive! Best Regards, The Team!

Dear all, There are some power cuts at CERN, and some of the servers are affected. We will inform you when everything is back to normal operation. Thanks for your understanding. The team. Update Dear all, The system is up and running again! Thanks for your understanding. The team! Update 2 Dear all, Unfortunately we are suffering today again some power cuts. We are working in the recovery of the systems. As soon as everything is back to normal, we will inform you. Best regards, The Team!

Dear all, We are very happy to announce that we have released today a new virtual machine (cernvm_2.5.1-3-1). This new version has several improvements at the low level that will help to improve the number of returned successful jobs. You will get the new virtual machine when all the jobs with the previous VM version have been processed. Best regards, The team.

Dear all, During this week you are going to experience some minor problems with the web application, as we are deploying it in your VMs. While the deployment is done, you will get the warning message from the web application, saying that your browser does not support HTML5 and Javascript, but giving you access to the figures and logs via two links. This warning message will be removed, once we have finally done the deployment. Sorry for the inconveniences. Best regards, The team. UPDATE: The new web application has been deployed in our servers. In one hour you should be able to reboot the VM if you want to see the new application or wait until your WU finishes. The next WU will have the updated code.