Hunt for Higgs Boson and dark matter now starts ON YOUR SOFA

If you're not too busy this weekend, why not sit down on your sofa and try to find a Higgs Boson or dark matter? The idea's feasible because CERN yesterday released data generated by the the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). “one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors” at the Large Hadron Collider. CERN says the …

[Ketlan]

Wow!

I'm sure I won't understand a word of it but kudos to CERN for releasing the data and the tools to (hopefully) make sense of it all.

[Sealand]

New data, please

If the data is from 2010, how can we be sure that IF we find dark matter, it hasn't expired?

I've found things in the fridge that might qualify.

[Andy The Hat]

Mauve alert, mauve alert, please change the bulb ...

I expected to find some kind of a virtual machine, how to install and let it do its thing in the background ... bit like Seti, Folding at Home etc so the tools do the work but I don't have to know what a two leprechaun decay event producing a fishing-gnome and an anti-fairy actually looks like ...

As it is, I'm not exactly a numpty and I have no idea where to start or, to be absolutely honest, if I can! Looks like I have to manually and sequentially run various shell scripts and python executable against various data sets as they're generated ... I think ...

Not for me I'm afraid.

[verdurin]

Re: Mauve alert, mauve alert, please change the bulb ...

There is a virtual machine, available at:

http://opendata.cern.ch/VM/CMS

The whole point is for people to be able to run the analysis tools themselves, to see how it's done.

[frank ly]

If CERN are interested, ....

... there is some strange matter under the cushions on my sofa.

[Omgwtfbbqtime]

Will it run under BOINC?

I'm already donating processor cycles to the BOINC client, it would be nice if I can just add this as another project.

[NotWorkAdmin]

Re: Will it run under BOINC?

That would seem to me to have been a logical approach to getting croud computing power. Pity they didn't think of it.

[verdurin]

Re: Will it run under BOINC?

We did think of it:

http://lhcathome.web.cern.ch/

[Isendel Steel]

Re: Will it run under BOINC?

Do you think this would run on a Raspberry Pi with BOINC ?

(serious question)

[NinjasFTW]

There goes my weekend.

I have no idea what to look for but I suspect that once I start tonight there will be a time dilation effect whereby it is suddenly Monday morning and my very angry wife is reminding me that its time to go to work and that I might want to eat/shower

[cs94njw]

Doesn't sound like a "Reverse the Odds" style app - playing games to research cancer.