Riccardo De Maria

LHC@Home: a BOINC-based volunteer computing infrastructure for physics studies at CERN

Abstract The LHC@Home BOINC project has provided computing capacity for numerical simulations to researchers at CERN since 2004, and has since 2011 been expanded with a wider range of applications. The traditional CERN accelerator physics simulation code SixTrack enjoys continuing volunteers support, and thanks to virtualisation a number of applications from the LHC experiment collaborations and particle theory groups have joined the consolidated LHC@Home BOINC project. This paper addresses the challenges related to traditional and virtualized applications in the BOINC environment, and how volunteer computing has been integrated into the overall computing strategy of the laboratory through the consolidated LHC@Home service. Thanks to the computing power provided by volunteers joining LHC@Home, numerous accelerator beam physics studies have been carried out, yielding an improved understanding of charged particle dynamics in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its future upgrades. The main results are highlighted in this paper.

JACoW : Simulations in Support of Wire Beam-Beam Compensation Experiment at the LHC

The compensation of long-range beam-beam interaction with current wires is considered as a possible technology for the HL-LHC upgrade project. A demonstration experiment is planned in the present LHC machine starting in 2018. This paper summarizes the tracking studies of long range beam-beam effect compensation in the LHC aimed to aid in planning the demonstration experiment. The impact of wire compensators is demonstrated on the tune footprints, dynamic aperture, beam emittance and beam intensity degradation. The simulations are performed with SIXTRACK code. The symplectic transport map for the wire element, its verification and implementation into the code are also discussed.