Let's take a look over Physics with Gridcoin and LHC@home!
Hey, fellow steemians and Science lovers! How are you? Welcome to my series of posts about Gridcoin and the Gridcoin related projects in particular.
After some weeks reviewing astronomy projects, today I decided, that is a time to take a look in a different direction and namely - Physics. LHC@Home is a volunteer computing platform directly in charge of CERN and The Large Hadron Collider.
We are surrounded of matter, different types of matter, particles, that exist longer and some that just exist a flick of a time. The main area of research of CERN is research in particle physics and nowadays our understanding of matter goes much deeper than the past years and decades. The study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the laws and forces, that play a role in the co-existance of the particles, are of extreme importance in the modern researches. Considering this fact, the laboratory of CERN is often referred to as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.
Of course, such a big organisation with so many scientists working constantly is supposed to have some great computation power and many of you may ask "Why do they need my volunteered resources too?". Yes, the institute of course possesses a tremendous amount of computation power, but that's not the point at all. Computation power is always needed!
CERN and its scientific and financial partners constantly strive to deliver enough computation power in order to handle all the needs of the currently running projects. Yet, most of the projects can always benefit from more resources, to make analysis faster, or to build up more detailed predictions. This is precisely where our help as volunteers can make a big difference.
The scientists are constantly trying to improve the way LHC functions as well as examine one of the most fundamental questions related to the nature of space and time back to the moments of the Universe's beginning. If we supply them with so much needed computational power, they will be able to make lots of refinements to their scientific models, and be more specific in all the aspects of the running scientific discoveries.
The point, of course, is that this "bonus" computation power is not of extreme importance, but by delivering it, we will make things become a lot faster.
Some of the projects currently running under CERN are very specific and require a lot of complex software, which is different from the well known BOINC, who serves us all. These various software products manage to deal with some very complex algorithms, which are part of the main program of the project. You can read the detailed instructions about installing and running these various software products on the web page of the LHC and CERN (http://lhcathome.web.cern.ch/about/how-it-works)
Joining these projects has never been easier, and we are happy to live in the age of technology and science. We can all make possible the faster scientific progress and it is all up to our will to share a part of our idle computer resources. I personally will be very happy to see more and more people, involved in these projects of course with the help of Gridcoin and BOINC.
Image source
One of the CERN's computer rooms
Say NO to pointless hashing. Act responsibly and trust Gridcoin - she smartest coin ever.