LHC@home: News

Best wishes for 2021

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 12:19:30 GMT

We would like to warmly thank all our volunteers for your contributions during 2020!

The LHC@home team also wishes you a Happy and hopefully healthy 2021!

For those interested, please find some highlights of CERN activities during 2020 and recent findings from the CMS experiment on our web pages.

Possible upload delays Wednesday 14/10

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 13:58:48 GMT

Due to an upgrade of our Ceph storage on Wednesday 14th of October, there might be delays to file uploads and data assimilation. Should be back to normal by Wednesday evening.

BOINC database downtime

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 06:22:24 GMT

The LHC@home database will be down for a while this morning, due to a network interruption in the CERN data centre. Hence scheduler requests and uploads will fail for a while.

Sorry for the trouble and happy crunching.

Interruption to CMS@Home, Wednesday 15th July

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 13:19:28 GMT

We need to interrupt the CMS project tomorrow to deploy a new Workflow Management Agent. This means that jobs will not be available from sometime tonight. We recommend that you set your CMS machines to No New Tasks as soon as possible, to avoid tasks terminating with an error if a job can't be fetched.
We anticipate jobs will be available again late Wednesday (European time). I'll update this thread when it is OK to proceed.

CMS job rundown

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 17:51:10 GMT

We need to do some tests of a patch to fix a bug that's been plaguing us for some time. To this end, I am letting the job queues drain, so there will be an absence of CMS jobs -- perhaps as soon as tomorrow morning, depending on how we continue to recover from today's Oracle quota problem.
So, be prepared to set No New Tasks as soon as you see any sign of lack of jobs -- or sooner if you prefer.
I don't know how long the testing will take, there are many factors at work (if the BOINC server sees that there are no jobs available, it will stop sending tasks; that will mean it takes longer for each test batch to be recognised and start serving jobs).

Downtime Saturday

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 09:11:51 GMT

The database underlying LHC@home will be down on Saturday 27th of June due to an upgrade of a DB storage rack.

Hence LHC@home BOINC services will be unavailable for a good part of the day. (Est 5:30-12:30 UTC)

So your BOINC client connections to our servers are likely to fail on Saturday.

Thanks and happy crunching!

Server outage Wednesday

Wed, 27 May 2020 17:59:14 GMT

Due to a failure of a database storage system, a number of database services at CERN failed on Wednesday afternoon. The LHC@home servers were affected as well, as the BOINC database was unavailable and requests timed out.

Sorry for the trouble and happy crunching!

CERN and COVID-19

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 06:09:07 GMT

Like many organisations, CERN is also affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers in the CERN community are trying to help out in different ways, as explained on this web page.

As part of this effort to fight COVID-19, we also contribute computing power to Folding@home and Rosetta@home from temporarily available servers that were about to be decommissioned.

During periods like this with little work from LHC@home, we also encourage you to participate in other BOINC projects such as Rosetta@home and contribute to the global fight of the pandemic.

Many thanks for your contributions to LHC@home and continued happy crunching!

With the best of wishes of good health for your and your families from the LHC@home team.

Server update

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 09:35:58 GMT

The BOINC daemons will be down for minor server update this afternoon. This is to bring our environment to the latest minor server release.

Theory application reaches 5 TRILLION events !!

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 07:02:52 GMT

LHC@home's Theory application will tomorrow pass the milestone of 5 TRILLION simulated events. This project, under its earlier name "Test4Theory", began production in 2011 and was the first BOINC project anywhere to use Virtual Machine technology (based on CERN's CernVM system).

Over the coming weeks we plan to publish some more details about all this on the LHC@home and CERN websites. Our timetables have of course been affected by the Coronavirus disruptions, but we absolutely could not miss announcing and celebrating such a milestone as this.

The whole LHC@home team sends our sincerest thanks to all our volunteers for enabling this achievement !!

Downtime Wednesday morning

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 11:54:23 GMT

The LHC@home servers will be down tomorrow Wednesday 11th of March from 6AM to 8AM UTC due to a database intervention.

Hence your BOINC clients may defer uploads or downloads. Thanks for your patience and happy crunching!

LHC@home web site upgrade

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 15:43:15 GMT

The LHC@home information site on Drupal that includes the FAQ and other information about the applications running on LHC@home is being upgraded now.

Hence links to the FAQ and other information pages about LHC@home will be unavailable for a while today.

The new site will be ready later this afternoon.

-- The team

CMS@Home -- ongoing problems

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 19:07:10 GMT

Sorry that the CMS@Home HTCondor server is still playing up. Again over the weekend it refused to serve jobs even though plenty were available. Together with Federica we've decided not to inject another workflow this week, to let if "fail hard" again so that she can investigate which ClassAd preferences are not being met.
So, you will probably see the number of running jobs falling, and the number of errors increasing, in the next few days. Please feel free to set No New Tasks in that case. I won't, so that there is still some pressure for jobs on the server. I've also asked Laurence if I can run the CMS@Home VM outside of BOINC, to get around the quota back-off problem.

CMS@Home up again

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 16:14:38 GMT

OK, jobs are available again. Sorry for the long delay. Remember, I'm only the front-man for a larger crew, so any downstream delays percolate up to my response. Hopefully this will remain good for some time, but I still don't understand why the condor server occasionally refuses to send out jobs in a timely manner.

CMS@Home accidentally shut down -- Please set No New Tasks

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 20:33:39 GMT

We need to upgrade the CMS@Home WMAgent before Thursday, so I tried to set the workflows to drain down. Unfortunately, I misunderstood the batch states and killed off most of them instead. :-(. There's one still left with about 200 jobs, so that won't last long.
Please set your CMS projects to No New Tasks to avoid getting lots of computation errors. I'll let you know when the upgrade is done and jobs are flowing again.

Server outage - uploads failing

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 12:31:25 GMT

Due to a network problem in the CERN computer centre early Thursday morning, our BOINC servers have lost access to a storage cluster. Hence uploads are failing and access to web pages as well. Hopefully this should be fixed soon.