http://www.stephenbrooks.org/muon1

For Immediate Release

16 July 2010

Muon1 Distributed Particle Accelerator
Design Project reaches 20 Quadrillion Milestone
The Muon1 Distributed Particle Accelerator Design Project proudly announces that today, at
08:07GMT, it reached the 20 quadrillion (20,000,000,000,000,000) particle time-steps (pts) milestone.
This is the amount of work needed to simulate a particle for 55 hours, 33 minutes and 20 seconds,
which at an average of 90% of the speed of light (0.9c) would cover a distance of 360 Astronomical
Units - ten times the average distance between Pluto and the Sun, and three times further than the mostdistance man-made object (Voyager 1) has traveled.
The Muon1 project attempts to assist in the design of the most efficient particle accelerator to form partof the Neutrino Factory project using the spare computing power available while volunteers' PCs areidle. It is run semi-independently by Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Stephen Brooks on a shoestring
budget.
The project works in a very different way to traditional distributed computing clients, as it does not usea standard work-unit allocation system to brute-force the task. While those systems are very efficient atdealing with small (1015 permutations) projects,” explains project head Stephen Brooks, “each of ourdesign ranges is at least an order of magnitude bigger with between 10300 and 10900 possible design
points. It's just not possible to work in that way.”
Genetic algorithms allow for extremely rapid progress in design work, as designs with potential areexamined closely, while designs that don't perform as required are given a basic investigation andstored for later use, significantly reducing the amount of processing time wasted on unproductive
designs. In some tasks, it has already been found to increase yield efficiency three-fold over the best
designs traditional methods have devised.
The flexible design process also means that as new theories or hypothesis are made or published thefield, the project can be returning results within as little as six hours. This enables the project to stay at
the cutting edge with minimal modifications. There is also the ability for end-users to manually enter
designs to be simulated with no physics knowledge needed, allowing people at any level of expertise topositively interact with the client.
Muon1_20quadrillion.pdf

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Muon1 has won acclaim for its accurate and colourful 3D visual mode, which allows the viewpoint tobe manipulated at will and has supported stereoscopic 3D viewing (via red-blue glasses) for manyyears. The client can be run in visual, command-line, hidden, and screensaver modes. Alternatively it
can be run though the BOINC client.
As the Muon1 project reaches this milestone, 9 years from it's humble beginnings with a handful ofpeople, it has expanded into the cutting edge of distributed computing design. In another nine years,
will this method of massive computation be the de facto standard?

About Muon1
Muon1 is a Windows-based distributed computing project that was started in 2001. Initially simulating
2500 particles, with a handful of people, now thousands of computers run the client simulating tens ofthousands of particles at a time. Simulations are run using 0.01 nanosecond increments, which define
the project's workload measure - particle-timesteps, or pts. An internet connection is preferred, but notrequired to participate. The client requires no integration with windows, and can be run from a portable
drive, and switched between computers as required.
The average size of a simulation run is 308 Million particle timesteps, and will take between 15 and 45
minutes for a typical modern computer, depending on hardware.
Further information about the project can be found at http://www.stephenbrooks.org/muon1/info/

About Stephen Brooks
Stephen Brooks, 26, is a research associate with the UK Neutrino Factory project, based at Rutherford
Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire. He studied mathematics, computation and mathematicalphysics first at the Open University and then at Oxford, graduating in 2001 and 2003, respectively.
Research interests centre around the application of numerical analysis methods to scientific andengineering problems, currently in particular the simulation of particle beams in accelerators.
###For more information contact
Stephen Brooks: sb@stephenbrooks.org
http://www.stephenbrooks.org/muon1/

Muon1_20quadrillion.pdf

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