Some of you know that I work on the CMS experiment at the LHC machine at CERN.
Some of you (particularly those who came to lunch with Uli in London recently) also know that I've taken on the job of being the public spokesman for the CMS@Home project, which ultimately aims to provide distributed-computing facilities to the more blue-skies speculative CMS scenarios (we already have the WLCG "GRID" for mainstream simulation and analysis, of course).

In the last few days, the pre-beta CMS@Home project has reached a major milestone -- we now can submit jobs to be run in the framework, and receive the results back for analysis. (HUZZAH!)

Unfortunately, there are critics, there are sceptics, there are nay-sayers...

So, I want to now run a test to compare CMS@Home against our traditional submission methods. And I have a natural target to present the results in just under four weeks' time.

Plan is this: next Wednesday, all going well, I will submit identical jobs to both the traditional route and CMS@Home. It'll be a fairly significant set of work, but should take less than a week either way. Then I collate and compare the results, and hopefully win some critics around.

We have currently a fairly enthusiastic set of volunteers (word leaked out early) but to do this in the time-scale I envisage, it'd be helpful to have about another fifty volunteers. I'll get onto how you can join in a minute...

Unfortunately, CMS@Home is not a set-and-forget project like SETI@Home, it requires some user assistance. To start with, we run within a Virtual Machine (if you're already running projects such as vLHC@Home then this will have no problems for you). It's also resource-hungry. Basic requirements are:
a) A 64-bit processor
b) Installation of Oracle's VirtualBox VM. Any modern version should do, BOINC will download V4.3.12 if you let it, V4.3.30 is the latest in that series, V5.0 also works except in Windows 10.
c) Good network connectivity, as there are large files to be transferred, especially at startup. I'd say a minimum of 10 Mbps; I survived at 6 Mbps but now I'm reduced to 3 Mbps I don't even try at home.

So, how do you volunteer? You can join at http://boincai05.cern.ch/CMS-dev, but you need an invitation code to do so (we got a lot of spurious sign-ups early on, perhaps in preparation for spamming runs :-(. You can find the code at http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~eesridr/cmsinvite.txt (deliberately non-clickable).

If you'd like to participate and have the requisite resources, please join as above, and test that you can run a task (a task runs for 24 hours, and tries to run as many "jobs" as possible in that time -- I create the jobs as required). With luck, you should start running a job within 30 minutes of downloading a task. When the task is running in BOINCMGR, select it and click on the VM button to the left; this will bring up a remote desktop display. At this point what you are most concerned about is the display of running jobs -- type ALT+F3 to bring up a "top" display (UNIX/Linux people will know what that means...); to further narrow in type 'u' (for user) and then 'boinc<cr>' (for the user name.

Hopefully, within about 30 minutes you will see a job called cmsRun occupying the top line of the job display, using close to 100% of CPU time. If that happens, please send me a short personal message along the lines of "Success!". Once I've had about fifty of these I'll delete the invitation code; don't be miffed if you miss out -- if this works how I hope, we'll be open for business before the year's out! Happy Crunching!

[Edit] Oh, to see the VBox display you'll also need the appropriate Extension Pack for your version of VirtualBox -- download here. [/Edit]

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Does Virtualbox still need the "Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack" (with matching version number) in order to use the remote desktop display?

Does Virtualbox still need the "Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack" (with matching version number) in order to use the remote desktop display?

You're too quick, Richard! Yes, see my redacted post...

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Hi,
I've been running this for the past four months, I've got jobs running smoothly and I'd like to add a few additions to Ivan's list above, because there is a LOT of data involved.

• Broadband at least 10M, always on.
  
• At least 3GB free memory. If you only have a 4GB memory machine, this is unlikely to work with other BOINC projects. And remember if you just Suspend the other projects for the day they will stay in memory - so suspend everything, restart BOINC and Then add CMS-dev.
  
• At least 8GB Hard Drive free space available to BOINC. (You'll get it all back when you Detach from the project, of course!)
  

Phil.

I'm out too, my internet connection is too slow..

Good luck

*Broadband at least 10M, always on.

Upload or Download? Or both?

And tell me where I can find Internet provider who promises 100% always on???

And bad timing for this project, WOW! Event is currently running. So most of users with required specifications are running WOW!....

*Broadband at least 10M, always on.

Upload or Download? Or both?

And tell me where I can find Internet provider who promises 100% always on??

Well yes, thats true. What I was trying to say is it isn't suitable for someone who has a monthly usage cap, or someone who uploads/downloads their SETI results daily from a coffee shop.

Theres an initial download of around a gigabyte.
You get one BOINC job per computer, it runs for 24 hours wall-time.
It does CMS jobs which download a few tens of megabytes, works on them for about half an hour and then uploads a similar amount.

*Broadband at least 10M, always on.

Upload or Download? Or both?

Download, mostly, the VM image is the best part of 1 GB. To be honest I haven't taken particular notice of the size of the returned data.

And tell me where I can find Internet provider who promises 100% always on???

And bad timing for this project, WOW! Event is currently running. So most of users with required specifications are running WOW!....

Ah, yes, that's unfortunate, but I need to press on with this as soon as I can. Let the chips fall where they may, we don't need the most capable players, in fact we need more the average guys.

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Hi Ivan, I wish you the very very best of luck with this endeavour, but I fear that I am unable to help personally.

Chris, I understand.

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I'm out too, my internet connection is too slow..

Good luck

Cheers, mate.

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What v-box version is required?

did not see, thanks.

did not read <<<<<<fixed that for you

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I came down with a bad case of i don't give a crap

Installed on my desktop since SETI runs on the server. BOINC appears to be running a task but it sure does not take much CPU time. All the BOINC and Vbox processes seem to total less than 1%. If that is really the case, it is quite a bit different than what I am used to with SETI.

Tried to attach to project.
http://boincai05.cern.ch/CMS-dev/index.php


Message: Project temporarily unavailable

Tried to attach to project.
http://boincai05.cern.ch/CMS-dev/index.php


Message: Project temporarily unavailable

That is the home page URL and it comes up fine for me.

I can see the home-page, but i cannot attach to the project with boinc.

I can see the home-page, but i cannot attach to the project with boinc.

Did you create an account first?

http://boincai05.cern.ch/CMS-dev/create_account_form.php

Never mind,
I got it.

Never mind,
I got it.

Great. I would be interested if you found that it was not very CPU intensive as well when you are up and running.