LHC design parameters are fine-tuned by home computers around the world.
Amid the celebrations surrounding the acclaimed finding by particle physicists of the long-predicted but very elusive Higgs Boson, I completely forgot the (very small but nevertheless important) part that thousands of non-scientists around the world played in what is expected to be remembered as a historic scientific discovery, confirming the Standard Model of particle physics. By sending elementary particles around the LHC at colossal speeds and colliding them to produce unimaginable energy, scientists are simulating the origin of the Universe in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
The Large Hadron Collider
"LHC@home" is one of several grid computing projects to which BOINC* participants contribute their idle computing time. CERN scientists have used 'distributed computing' enthusiasts for many years to fine tune the intricate design parameters of the astonishing Large Hadron Collider. It assists them in setting the parameters of each experiment they conduct. A machine as complicated as the LHC has many variables to tweak!
As of today, LHC@home has 100,990** registered contributors in 189 countries; and whilst the project will sometimes go a bit quiet for a while, every so often CERN will send out work-units for our home computers to silently process as a background task on our computers.
After quite a few months dormant, "LHC@home" has been very active over recent weeks - and now we know why!
---o---
* BOINC has 2.4 million contributors to it's many different projects!
** My contribution to the LHC project is ranked 6,859th! :)
LHC@home website.
BOINC website.