Gridcoin Mining and my contribution to LHC@Home

Hi everyone,

One more week just passed, and again is time to share a status of my Gridcoin project. I'm not changing to much the projects that I have allocated to my computers, but if you have some suggestions, please add them in the comment section. My preferred project remains LHC@Home, with the SixTrack application, which is using the distributed computing network to run mathematical calibrations of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

To give some details about the aim of the SixTrack application, just imagine that a LHC is a machine of huge complexity, that has a large number of parameters that need to be adapted on daily bases. In fact, the LHC is not only the world's most powerful particle collider, but the most complex experimental facility ever built in the history of our civilization.

The construction of the LHC took over 10 years, involving over 10 000 scientists from over 100 countries. It has the most powerful particle accelerator.

Particles are accelerated using 10 000 superconducting magnets installed in a circular tunnel, with a circumference of 27 kilometers. The magnets are cooled down to a extreme temperature of only 1.9 Kelvin (-271°C), using 96 tonnes of super fluid helium.

Using those magnets, two particles are accelerated in opposite directions to speeds very close to the speed of light (actually, only 11 km/h slower compared to the speed of light). Actually, you can not accelerate single particles, but several bunches, each bunch having 115 billion protons. And once the particles are accelerated at the intended speed, opposite particles are collided together, resulting in the creation of different new particles.

After the collision is done, different detectors are used to search for the new particles: bosons, quarks, or antimatter.

And some of the particles can have enough energy to create micro black holes. Luckily, if micro black holes do appear in the collisions, they would disintegrate rapidly, in around 10^-27 seconds.

What does all of this have to do with your personal computers? Well, in order to find the right parameters for such a complex system, the CERN scientist need to run several simulations using the model of the LHC collider with different parameters and different particles they plan to run experiments in the future.

Isn't it amazing to run on your personal computer a small piece of the puzzle that might unveil the mysteries of quantum physics? Or to contribute to the understanding of the dark matter?

Last week I got lot of work units from LHC@Home, and this is how the split over different projects was looking like:

My numbers for the 11^th week of 2018:

• Magnitude: 10.74
• Daily GRCs: 2.69
• Wallet: 1338.78
• Time Since Last Reward: 1 week, 3 days, 4 hours, 15 minutes
• Estimated Research Owed: 27.34
• Estimated Interest Owed: 0.56