Researchers in the UK are gearing up for an influx of help, with the recent arrival of the successful LHC@home volunteer computing project at Queen Mary, University of London.
Forty thousand people from more than 100 countries have already contributed the equivalent of about 3000 years on a single computer to LHC@home, which is migrating from its first home at CERN.
Running off the BOINC platform, LHC@home uses volunteer computing power to model the progress of subatomic particles travelling at nearly the speed of light around Europe's newest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Lyn Evans, head of the LHC project, says that "the results from this initiative are really making a difference, providing us with new insights into how the LHC will perform".
LHC@home is a collaboration between CERN; the Helsinki Institute of Physics; the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen; Queen Mary, University of London; and TRIUMF in Vancouver, and will now be managed by physicists from the GridPP project in the UK.
GridPP's Neasan O'Neill explains: "We started trial running LHC@home from a computer server in the UK in June, and have spent the last few months working with the physicists who use the data it produces. Now, with the official launch of the UK base for the project, we're ready to fully exploit this fantastic resource."
• This article was published online in iSGTW on 17 October.