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CERN believes that the LHC will let scientists re-create how the universe behaved immediately after the Big Bang,Search for God (Particles) Drives Massive Storage Needs
:: 23 July, 2007
About CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and its massive particle accelerators in Angels & Demons by Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame. In that book, the lead character travels to the cavernous research institute on the border of France and Switzerland to help investigate a murder. In real life, one of CERN's grisliest problems is finding storage for the massive amounts of data derived from its four high-profile physics experiments making use of the institute's large hadron collider (LHC). Due for operation in May 2008, the LHC is a 27-kilometer-long device designed to accelerate subatomic particles to ridiculous speeds, smash them into each other and then record the results.
The LHC experiments will study everything from the tiniest forms of matter to the questions surrounding the Big Bang. The latter subject provided Pierre Vande Vyvre, a project leader for data acquisition for CERN, with a particularly thorny challenge: He had to design a storage system for one of the four experiments, ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). It's one of the biggest physics experiments of our time, boasting a team of more than 1,000 scientists from around the world.
For one month per year, the LHC will be spitting out project data to the ALICE team at a rate of 1GB per second. That's 1GB per second, for a full month, "day and night," Vande Vyvre says. For this month, that data rate is an entire order of magnitude larger than each of the other three experiments being done with the LHC. In total, the four experiments will generate petabytes of data.
CERN believes that the LHC will let scientists re-create how the universe behaved immediately after the Big Bang. At that time, everything was a "sort of hot dense soup...composed of elementary particles," the project's webpage explains. The LHC can trigger "little bangs" that let ALICE scientists study how the particles act and come together, helping answer questions about the actual structure of atoms.
"The data is what the whole experiment is producing," Vande Vyvre says. "This is the most precious thing we have.”
Vande Vyvre is charged with managing the PCs, storage equipment, and custom and homegrown software surrounding the ALICE project's data before it hits the data center and gets archived. The ALICE group's experiments will start running in May 2008, but the storage rollout began in September 2006.
The ALICE experiment grabs its data from 500 optical fiber links and feeds data about the collisions to 200 PCs, which start to piece the many snippets of data together into a more coherent picture. Next, the data travels to another 50 PCs that do more work putting the picture together, then record the data to disk near the experiment site, which is about 10 miles away from the data center. "During this one month, we need a huge disk buffer,"
News Inside News
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), commonly known as CERN (see Naming), pronounced [sɝn] (or [sɛʀn] in French), is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated just northwest of Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. The convention establishing CERN was signed on 29 September 1954. From the original 12 signatories of the CERN convention, membership has grown to the present 20 member states. Its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. Numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations to make use of them.
The main site at Meyrin also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data processing facilities primarily for experimental data analysis, and because of the need to make them available to researchers elsewhere, has historically been (and continues to be) a major wide area networking hub.
CERN currently has approximately 2600 full-time employees. Some 7931 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities), about half of the world's particle physics community, work on experiments conducted at CERN.
As an international facility, the CERN sites are not officially under Swiss or French jurisdiction, and some company vehicles have diplomatic number plates.
Naming
The acronym CERN originally stood, in French, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by 11 European governments in 1952. The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1954.[1] According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the acronym could have become the awkward OERN, and Heisenberg said "But the acronym can still be CERN even if the name is [...]"
Soon after its establishment, the work at the laboratory went beyond the study of the atomic nucleus, into higher-energy physics, an activity which is mainly concerned with the study of interactions between particles. Therefore the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics (Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules) which better describes the current research being performed at CERN.
Scientific achievements
Several important achievements in particle physics have been made during experiments at CERN. These include, but are not limited to:
1973: The discovery of neutral currents in the Gargamelle bubble chamber.
1983: The discovery of W and Z bosons in the UA1 and UA2 experiments.
1995: The first creation of antihydrogen atoms in the PS210 experiment.
2001: The discovery of direct CP-violation in the NA48 experiments.
The 1984 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer for the W and Z boson discoveries.
The 1992 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Georges Charpak "for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber."
Current accelerator complex
CERN operates a network of six accelerators and a decelerator. Each machine in the chain increases the energy of particle beams before delivering them to experiments or to the next more powerful accelerator. Currently active machines are:
Two linear accelerators generate low energy particles for injection into the Proton Synchrotron. The 50 MeV Linac2 is for protons, and the 4.2 MeV/u Linac3 is for heavy ions.[1]
The Proton Synchrotron Booster increases the energy of particles generated by the proton linear accelerator before they are transferred to the other accelerators.
The Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR) accelerates the ions from the ion linear accelerator, before transferring them to the Proton Synchrotron (PS). This accelerator was commissioned in 2005, after having been reconfigured from the previous Low Energy Anti-protong Ring (LEAR).
The 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron (PS), built in 1959 and still operating as a feeder to the more powerful SPS.
The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), a circular accelerator with a diameter of 2 kilometres built in a tunnel, which started operation in 1976. It was designed to deliver an energy of 300 GeV and was gradually upgraded to 450 GeV. As well as having its own beamlines for fixed-target experiments, it has been operated as a proton-antiproton collider, and for accelerating high energy electrons and positrons which were injected into the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP). From 2008 onwards, it will inject protons and heavy ions into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The On-Line Isotope Mass Separator (ISOLDE), which is used to study unstable nuclei. Particles are initially accelerated in the PS Booster before entering ISOLDE. It was first commissioned in 1967 and was rebuilt with major upgrades in 1974 and 1992.
The Antiproton Decelerator (AD), which reduces the velocity of antiprotons to about 10% the speed of light for research into antimatter.
The accelerator of the future: the Large Hadron Collider
Most of the activities at CERN are currently directed towards building a new collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the experiments for it. The LHC represents a large-scale, worldwide scientific cooperation project. Physics experiments are expected to start May 2008, delayed due to a inner triplet magnet assembly failing a pressure test in March 2007[2][3].
The LHC tunnel is located 100 metres underground, in the region between the Geneva airport and the nearby Jura mountains. It uses the 27 km circumference circular tunnel previously occupied by LEP which was closed down in November 2000. CERN's existing PS/SPS accelerator complexes will be used to pre-accelerate protons which will then be injected into the LHC.
Six experiments (CMS, ATLAS, LHCb, TOTEM, LHC-forward and ALICE) are currently being built, and will be running on the collider; each of them will study particle collisions under a different point of view, and with different technologies. Construction for these experiments needed an extraordinary engineering effort. Just as an example, to lower the pieces for the CMS experiment into the underground cavern which will host it, a special crane will have to be rented from Belgium, which will be able to lift the almost 2000 tons for each piece. The first of the approximately 5,000 magnets necessary for construction was lowered down a special shaft at 13:00 GMT on 7 March 2005.
This accelerator will generate vast quantities of computer data, which CERN will stream to laboratories around the world for distributed processing (the GRID technology). In April 2005, a trial successfully streamed 600MB per second to seven different sites across the world. If all the data generated by the LHC is to be analysed, then scientists must achieve 1,800MB per second before 2007.
Decommissioned accelerators
The original linear accelerator (Linac1).
The 600 MeV Synchro-Cyclotron (SC) which started operation in 1957 and was shut down in 1991.
The Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR), an early collider built from 1966 to 1971 and operated until 1984.
The Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), which operated from 1989 to 2000 and was the largest machine of its kind, housed in a 27 km-long circular tunnel which is now being used to build the Large Hadron Collider.
The Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR), commissioned in 1982, which assembled the first pieces of true antimatter, in 1995, consisting of nine atoms of antihydrogen. It was closed in 1996, and superseded by the Antiproton Decelerator.
Contacts
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Tags: CERN , Angels & Demons , accelerators , storage for the massive amounts of data , high-profile physics , high-profile physics experiments , LHC ,
