The LHC isn
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Hardware, Intel, Networking, HP, Internet on
Simulating the big bang and colliding particles at the speed of light takes a lot of space, makes a lot of data - and it isn’t going to blow up the planet.
The Large Hadron Collider has been running quietly for a week and no tiny black holes have made their way out through the giant concrete end caps yet, so the world is probably safe.
The collider itself is a vast confection of superconducting magnets and we were lucky enough to go down into the caverns last year while it was still being constructed. The scale of the shaft and the cavern are impressive enough; ATLAS is just one of the detectors on the ring and the structure dwarfs the engineers putting to together.
We’ve put together a look at the detector using Microsoft’s Silverlight DeepZoom technology.
An experiment like the Large Hadron Collider also produces a lot of data: 15 million gigabytes a year, streaming out of CERN to a worldwide computing grid at 2GB/second through an HP ProCurve infrastructure. The mainframes and supercomputers that processed the data in decades past have been replaced by rows of PCs. The cavernous computing centre looks like an old school gym; half of it is full of familiar tower cases, the other half is filling up with racks and blades and tape library robots as CERN builds its own mega-data centre.
You need a special invitation - or a research project - to get into the caverns at CERN, now that the LHC is switched on. But you can book a tour to see one of the other particle accelerators, decelerators and colliders where researchers try to recreate the first seconds after the Big Bang - or you can head down to the basement to see the Tim Berners-Lee’s first Web server.
A slightly battered NexT cube with a hand-written label peeling off from the front of the case, the memo of the original World Wide Web proposal lying over the keyboard; if there was a coffee cup in the display case, you’d expect Sir Tim to come back and sit down at any minute. Also behind glass is one of the first Cisco routers to make it to Europe; it’s a hefty beige box that cost $10,000 back in 1984.
Tours start in the dramatic wooden Globe of Science and Innovation, but take a minute to stand in the main reception area across the road. The coloured lights shooting through the concrete floor flash every time cosmic rays are detected; that bright blue could be a solar flare or a supernova.
-Mary
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Loading ...Pingback by - September 10, 2008 on 7:05 pm
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Comment by - September 11, 2008 on 5:20 am
14 billion years ago, big bang begin occurs on small matterial (coin), same as in september 2008 (coin), the big bang will be back again, whole can be destroy, TO STOP LHC!!
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