Gridcoin weekly project stats - 23/Oct/17

Here is another Gridcoin project stats update with special focus on LHC@Home and its weekly charts.

LHC@Home is run by CERN laboratory (http://lhcathome.web.cern.ch/) which sits near Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border. LHC@Home entails a number of sub-projects with different goals:

• LHCb – The LHCb experiment exams the decays of 'b' and 'anti-b' quarks which are unstable and short-lived. They decay rapidly into a range of other particles and were common in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
  To run this sub-project your system requires VirtualBox and have EM64T enabled.
• CMS@Home – The goal of CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter.
  To run this sub-project your system requires VirtualBox and have EM64T enabled.
• Atlas@Home – The experiment is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented energy available at the LHC and observe phenomena that involve highly massive particles which were not observable using earlier lower-energy accelerators. It is hoped that it will shed light on new theories of particle physics beyond the Standard Model.
  To run this sub-project your system requires VirtualBox and have EM64T enabled.
• Test4Theory – Test4Theory simulates high-energy particle collisions and helps tune the theory to experimental results. These simulations use theoretical models based on the Standard Model of particle physics and are calculated using Monte Carlo methods.
  To run this sub-project your system only requires VirtualBox.
• Sixtrack – The Sixtrack sub-project helps CERN accelerator engineers to run intensive simulations to check the stability of the twin proton beams circulating in the LHC machine
  There are no specific requirements to run this sub-project.

The first 4 sub-projects require VirtualBox and EM64T enabled to receive work-units. Moreover, the tasks use a substantial amount of memory which only a limited number of users is willing to support. As a result, the 4 sub-projects provide a relatively low but steady RAC output for LHC@Home.

On the other hand, Sixtrack work-units run on any system and the memory requirements are limited. Work arrives in big blocks, resulting in a temporary RAC level jump. After a few days, when these work-units are depleted, the RAC level gradually drops again towards a base level set by the first 4 sub-projects. As a consequence the LHC@Home RAC chart looks different from most other projects (see chart below).

Chart 1: Gridcoin team RAC

Obviously, the jump and drop in RAC levels have an impact on GRC earnings as well which moves in opposite direction (see chart below again).

Chart 2: GRC earnings per 1k RAC

So, if you have Vbox installed and plenty of memory in your system, LHC@Home could be an attractive GRC generating project.

And now to the graphs for all projects, hope you find them beneficial.

Sources:

• Gridcoinstats (https://www.gridcoinstats.eu/)
• BOINCStats (https://boincstats.com/)
• Coinmarket (https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/gridcoin/)
• CERN (http://lhcathome.web.cern.ch/)