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What to do with 15 million gigabytes of data
November 03, 2008When it is fully up and running, the four massive detectors on the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva are expected to produce up to 15 million gigabytes, aka 15 petabytes, of data every year. Andreas Hirstius, manager of CERN Openlab and the CERN School of Computing, explains in November's Physics World how computer scientists have risen to the challenge of dealing with this unprecedented volume of data.
When CERN staff first considered how they might deal with the large volume of data that the huge collider would produce when its two beams of protons collide, in the mid-1990s, a single gigabyte of disk space still cost a few hundred dollars and CERN's total external connectivity was equivalent to just one of today's broadband connections.
High-performance computing is ideal for particle physics because the data produced in the millions of proton-proton collisions are all independent of one another - and can therefore be handled independently. So, rather than using a massive all-in-one mainframe supercomputer to analyse the results, the data can be sent to separate computers, all connected via a network.
From here sprung the LHC Grid. The Grid, which was officially inaugurated last month, is a tiered structure centred on CERN (Tier-0), which is connected by superfast fibre links to 11 Tier-1 centres at places like the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK and Fermilab in the US. More than one CD's worth of data (about 700 MB) can be sent down these fibres to each of the Tier-1 centres every second.
Tier 1 centres then feed down to another 250 regional Tier-2 centres that are in turn accessed by individual researchers through university computer clusters and desktops and laptops (Tier-3).
As Andreas Hirstius writes, "The LHC challenge presented to CERN's computer scientists was as big as the challenges to its engineers and physicists. The computer scientists managed to develop a computing infrastructure that can handle huge amounts of data, thereby fulfilling all of the physicists' requirements and in some cases even going beyond them."
Institute of Physics
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Prestigious Discoveries at CERN by Roger Cashmore (Editor), Luciano Maiani (Editor), Jean-Pierre Revol (Editor) The discoveries of neutral currents and of the W and Z bosons marked a watershed in the history of CERN. They established the validity of the electroweak theory and convinced the physicists of the importance of renormalizable non-Abelian gauge theories of the fundamental interactions. The articles collected in this book have been written by distinguished physicists who contributed in a crucial way to these developments. The book is a historical account of those discoveries and of the construction and the testing of the standard model. It also reports on the future of particle physics and provides an updated status report on the LHC and its detectors being currently built at CERN. The book addresses readers interested in particle physics including the educated public. |
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60 Minutes - The Collider (September 28, 2008) Under the meadows and mountains outside Geneva, 9,000 physicists from all over the world are taking part in one of the biggest, most ambitious scientific collaborations in history. It's called the large hadron collider, a massive scientific instrument that took 20 years to create and cost $8 billion. Steve Kroft descends into the heart of the collider to find out what we hope to learn when atoms smash into each other. This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply. |
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LEP - The Lord of the Collider Rings at CERN 1980-2000: The Making, Operation and Legacy of the World's Largest Scientific Instrument by Herwig Schopper (Author), Rolf-Dieter Heuer (Foreword) Housed by a 4 m diameter tunnel of 27 km circumference, with huge underground labs and numerous surface facilities, and set up with a precision of 0.1 mm per kilometer, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) was not only the largest but also one of the most sophisticated scientific research instruments ever created by Man. Located at CERN, near Geneva, LEP was built during the years 1983 - 1989, was operational until 2000, and corroborated the standard model of particle physics through continuous high precision measurements. The Author, director-general of CERN during the crucial period of the construction of LEP, recounts vividly the convoluted decision-making and technical implementation processes - the tunnel alone being a highly challenging geo- and civil engineering... |
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The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider by Don Lincoln (Author) The highest-energy particle accelerator ever built, the Large Hadron Collider runs under the border between France and Switzerland. It leapt into action on September 10, 2008, amid unprecedented global press coverage and widespread fears that its energy would create tiny black holes that could destroy the earth. By smashing together particles smaller than atoms, the LHC recreates the conditions hypothesized to have existed just moments after the big bang. Physicists expect it to aid our understanding of how the universe came into being and to show us much about the standard model of particle physics -- even possibly proving the existence of the mysterious Higgs boson. In exploring what the collider does and what it might find, Don Lincoln explains what the LHC is likely to teach... |
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