Test4Theory@home: SixTrack News - May 2017

The SixTrack team would like to thank all the teams who took part in the 2017 pentathlon hosted by SETI.Germany:
https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/
where LHC@Home was chosen for the swimming discipline. The pentathlon gave us the possibility of carrying out a vast simulation campaign, with lots of new results generated that we are now analysing. While the LHC experiments send volunteers tasks where data collected by the LHC detectors has to be analysed or Monte Carlo codes for data generation, SixTrack work units probe the dynamics of LHC beams; hence, your computers are running a live model of the LHC in order to explore its potential without actually using real LHC machine time, precious to physics.

Your contribution to our analyses is essential. For instance, we reached ~2.5 MWUs processed in total, with a peak slightly above 400kWUs processed at the same time, and >50TFLOPs, during the entire two weeks of the pentathlon. The pentathlon was also the occasion to verify recent improvements to our software infrastructure. After this valuable experience, we are now concentrating our energies on updating the executables with brand new functionality, extending the range of studies and of supported systems. This implies an even increased dependence on your valuable support.

Thanks a lot to all people involved! We count on your help and committment to science and to LHC@home to pursue the new challenges of beam dynamics which lie ahead.

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