Volunteer computing project LHC@home

CERN supports European Year of Volunteering through Citizen Cyberscience Centre Geneva, 8 August 2011. Today, researchers at CERN ¹ began public testing of a new version of the popular volunteer computing project LHC@home ² . This version allows volunteers to participate for the first time in simulating high-energy collisions of protons in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Thus, volunteers can now actively help physicists in the search for new fundamental particles that will provide insights into the origin of our Universe, by contributing spare computing power from their personal computers and laptops. This is just one example of a series of projects and events organized by the Citizen Cyberscience Centre ³ , a partnership between CERN, UNITAR (the UN Institute for Training and Research) and the University of Geneva, to promote volunteer-based science in this, the European Year of Volunteering 2011 ⁴ . Other projects the Citizen Cyberscience Centre has initiated focus on promoting volunteer science in the developing world, for humanitarian purposes. For example, in collaboration with IBM's philanthropic World Community Grid and Tsinghua University in Beijing, the Citizen Cyberscience Centre launched the Computing for Clean Water project ⁵ .