LHC Gets Outside Aide From Global Computer Network
Posted on: Wednesday, 10 September 2008, 14:43 CDT
The world's largest experiment in physics, the Hadron Particle Collider, began running Wednesday in a 17 mile tunnel under the French-Swiss border. The collider produces so much information that even the enormous computing authority of the European Organization for Nuclear Research cannot process it all.
The Geneva-based laboratory, identified by the French acronym CERN, is dividing the load of work among many computing centers around the globe.
The consequence of the division is the LHC Grid, which is a network made up of about 60,000 computers. The computers will investigate what occurs when protons are thrown at each other when inside the collider.
Scientists must have the added power to filter through the huge amount of information created when the colliders' four colossal detectors calculate the activity at a subatomic level.
"You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second," says CERN's Ian Bird. Bird leads the grid project.
Complicated filters dispose of all but the most intriguing data. That still leaves 15 petabytes to be studied each year - enough to fill 2 million DVDs. Then it will be propelled through high-speed lines to the top eleven research institutions in Europe, North America and Asia. From these institutions they are sent to a broader network of 150 facilities where the information will be studied by researchers who can contribute to the glory of any finding.
Distributed computing has been seen in the past prior to this experiment. However, the immense size of the CERN project will be strongly watched by scientists that anticipate grid computing to be even more extensively used for multiple kinds of research.
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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Posted by .com on 09/10/2008, 14:52 what a great achivement for mankind |
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