LHC@home: Test4Theory

The modus operandi of this project is the following:

• The BOINC client requests a task to run from the project server.
• The BOINC client should then receive two files: a CernVM image file and an executable program called the Wrapper.
• The Wrapper program will launch the CernVM virtual machine inside VirtualBox, and soon you should be able to see a window from VirtualBox similar to this:

• If this is the first time that you run VirtualBox, another window will pop-up warning you about how the keyboard and mouse will be grabbed for the virtual machine. This is important, because once you click inside the VM window, your keyboard and mouse pointer will be only visible within this VirtualBox VM. The warning window says that, to get the keyboard and mouse released you have to press the right control key of your keyboard (or on Mac press the Apple-Cmd key).
• Then you should be able to see the CernVM booting procedure in the window.
• When booting is done, you will see activity of the Co-Pilot agent requesting jobs from CERN.
• If you want to see what is going on in your virtual machine, you can press alt+F1, alt+F2, alt+F3, alt+F4 or alt+F5 to view the output of the running processes:
  • alt+F1 shows output of the Co-Pilot agent (which gets the jobs from CERN).
  • alt+F2 shows output of each actual running job
  • alt+F3 shows Co-Pilot agent error output (if any)
  • alt+F4 shows job error output (if any)
  • alt+F5 shows system summary information (output from top command)
• Note that on Mac, you must press (fn+ctrl+alt)+Fx instead of (alt)+Fx
• As this window is running the CERN physics jobs, its standard "close" behavior has been disabled in order to avoid aborting the execution of the jobs. (If you want to close the window and stop running jobs, you only have to quit the BOINC client)

An example of the second virtual terminal output while running a job (alt+F2):

..and an example of the second terminal output at the end of a job (alt+F2):

Here is typical output of the 1st terminal showing Co-Pilot activity (alt+F1):

An example of alt+F5:

If your virtual machine is not showing this sort of information, please ask for help in the Forums or Q&A section of the project.