News for the curious.

"Dear Users:

On November 1st, we made our first Status Report to you, which you can reread at: http://lhcathome.cern.ch/announcement1.html

In that, we said:

"... So the decision has been taken to make BOINC a more permanent facility at CERN. For this to occur, we will soon need a pause to install a modern hi-tech server system (replacing our two old borrowed server machines). We will redesign our job management system and fix problems causing small numerical differences and some strange runtime errors. A new and improved optical model of the LHC accelerator is also being prepared.

The most likely timescale for this shutdown will be from mid or late November, coming up again with the improved system in December or early 2005."

We are now in the middle of this announced shutdown. Almost all the invaluable student staff of the original LHC@Home project have left CERN to return to their studies. Our physics staff are working as described above. As CERN closes for the holidays on December 18th, we will not come up again before early 2005 as stated.

Very little effort exists during shutdown to read and answer the Message Boards, for which we apologize. We appreciate our users' continuing interest in LHC@Home, and particularly the generosity of those more experienced users who answer many questions from others.

Please accept our holiday and New Year's greetings - and see you in 2005!

Ben Segal - LHC@Home Coordinator "

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Thanks for the Info Matt

GR

ric

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