http://stephenbrooks.org/muon1

For Immediate Release

10 June 2011

Muon1 Distributed Particle Accelerator
Design Project reaches 25 Quadrillion Milestone
The Muon1 Distributed Particle Accelerator Design Project proudly announces that today, at
14:03UTC, it reached the 25 quadrillion (25,000,000,000,000,000) particle timesteps (pts) milestone.
The Muon1 project attempts to assist in the design of the most efficient particle accelerator to form part of theNeutrino Factory project using the spare computing power available while volunteers' PCs are idle. 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 use astandard work-unit allocation system to brute-force the task. Instead of a central server assigning blocks of work
to users which are crunched and returned, clients start off with random designs, which are are then modified in
an attempt to improve things. Results are returned to the servers with the best designs available to clients toincorporate into their future designs.
“While brute force systems are very efficient at dealing with small (10 15 permutations) projects,” explains project
head Stephen Brooks, “each of our design ranges are incredibly vast, 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 are examinedclosely, while designs that don't perform as required are given a basic investigation and stored 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 the field, theproject 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 to positively interact with the client.
Muon1 has won acclaim for its accurate and colourful 3D visual mode, which allows the viewpoint to bemanipulated at will and has supported stereoscopic 3D viewing (via red-blue glasses) for many years. The client
can be run in visual, command-line, hidden, and screensaver modes. Alternatively it can be run though theBOINC client, as part of the Yoyo@home project.
Muon1-25quadrillion-20110610.pdf

Page 1/2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 of thousands ofparticles at a time. Simulations work using 0.01 nanosecond increments (a 'timestep'), which define the project's
workload measure - particle-timesteps, or pts. An internet connection is preferred, but not required toparticipate. The client requires no integration with windows, and can be run from a portable drive, and switchedbetween computers as required.
The average size of a simulation run is 308 million particle timesteps, and will take between 15 and 90 minutes
for a typical modern multi-core computer, depending on hardware.
Further information about the project can be found at http://stephenbrooks.org/muon1/info/

About Stephen Brooks
Stephen Brooks, 27, is a research associate with the UK Neutrino Factory project, based at Rutherford Appleton
Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire. He studied mathematics, computation and mathematical physics first at theOpen University and then at Oxford, graduating in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Research interests centre aroundthe application of numerical analysis methods to scientific and engineering problems, currently in particular thesimulation of particle beams in accelerators.

Notes for Editors
25 quadrillion particle timesteps is the equivalent of simulating a single particle for 69 hours, 26 minutes and 40seconds.
In the simulation, approximately 3 millimetres (3/32 of an inch) is travelled every timestep (0.01 nanoseconds)
by the particles, travelling near the speed of light..
After 25 quadrillion timesteps, that particle would have travelled 75,000,000,000km (46,600,000,000 miles), orroughly 501 Astronomical Units (1AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun). For comparison, Voyager 1, themost distant man-made object, is 117AU from the Sun.

###For more information contact
Stephen Brooks: sb@stephenbrooks.org
http://stephenbrooks.org/muon1/
Video footage of the client in operation is available on request.

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Muon1-25quadrillion-20110610.pdf

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