Storing CERN's Search for God (Particles)

Chris Lindquist writes "Think your storage headaches are big? When it goes live in 2008, CERN's ALICE experiment will use 500 optical fiber links to feed particle collision data to hundreds of PCs at a rate of 1GB/second, every second, for a month. 'During this one month, we need a huge disk buffer,' says Pierre Vande Vyvre, CERN's project leader for data acquisition. One might call that an understatement. CIO.com's story has more details about the project and the SAN tasked with catching the flood of data."

If Only...

[i_ate_god]

If only I could get porn that fast

there I said it, let's move on now.

Re:PC's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually their plan is to store all that data on Commodore 64 cassette tapes.

Re:PC's?

[1310nm]

load"*",8,1
Ok, who put California Games x 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0 on the tapes?

Re:Pseudo-Dupe?

[Easy2RememberNick]

Nah it's just, spooky article submission at a distance.

  The other article appeared because it knew this one would be submitted later in the future.

FTL

[unchiujar]

"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."
Next up ludicrous speed [wikipedia.org]!!! Better fasten your seat belts...

Thousands of disk drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, lets see. ~2700 TB of data over one month. Let's store it on 500 GB drives. That's 5400 disk drives just to store the data. Add in the the extra drives for parity, and a few hundred hot spares, this thing could easily use OVER NINE THOUSAND drives.

Re:Searching for God

[ammonynous]

With a God Particle generator, wouldn't you *generate* God? Wouldn't that be a hoot?!?

Re:Um no...it's a product placement for Quantum

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...no. Actually, it's a product placement PR piece about Quantum's StorNext. (Read page 2...)

We knew there were some serious nerds on Slashdot, but to be potential customers for the same RAID system as CERN, whoa! :)

Re:Searching for God

[edsyc]

The physicists don't really want to find god, it's just the only way they can get research funding under the bush administration.

Re:Idea

[KillerCow]

./go.sh | bzip2 > results.bz2 Problem solved!

No. No, my friend; you do not grasp the scale of this project.
 
./go.sh | bzip2 | bzip2 > results.bz2

Re:Gigabits or Bytes?

[Anonymous Coward]

"2,629,743 seconds in a month, so... 2,629,743 GB or 328,717 GB?"

If they were smart, they'd choose February. They could save ~172800 seconds and therefore some disk space!

E-Mail it to Google

[Nom du Keyboard]

Just e-mail it all to Google. By then gMail should be able to handle that much per user.

Re:News for Nerds!

[uolamer]

ftp.alice.cern.ch/incoming/ /~~--allah-was-here--~~/0day/

God Particles

[pipingguy]

According to a guy that I met yesterday on the street (he was talking to himself or somebody) the only way I could meet God (and hopefully His particles) was through his son. WTF? Can't even *God* get a good secretary these days?

Finding God

[Mark_MF-WN]

Don't worry -- the products of particle accelerators only exist for a few picoseconds. If God is created during a collision event, he will wink out of existence so fast that we'll only become aware of his presence by the shower of Mormonions and PatRobertsonite particles impinging on the detection apparatus.

Backup options

[Mostly a lurker]

I assume they will want to have more than one copy of this for backup purposes. Here is my analysis on their choices. The total data to be backup up (for the month) is taken as a lazy 1 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2,592,000 gigabytes

• Printed hardcopy. Many authorities recommend this as you do not need to worry about changes in data formats over time. For exact calculation, we would need to know the font they were planning to use and the character encoding. However, let's take a working assumption that they can cram 10KB of data onto an A4 sheet. That implies 259,200,000,000,000 pages. They will probably not want to use an inkjet printer if they use this solution and may, indeed, choose to acquire multiple printers and split the load. A single printer at 10 ppm would take approximately 50,000 years to complete the backup. On 70gm paper, it would weigh a little over two million tons. At any rate, this would certainly produce reams of output.
• Diskettes. This was good enough for nearly everyone 15 years ago. It is curious that such a tried and trusted technique is no longer in fashion. I assume regular 3.5" 1.44MB diskettes, generally recognised as easier to handle than 5.25". We shall need around 1,800,000,000 diskettes. One drawback is the person changing the diskettes as each one filled up might become a little bored after a while. On the positive side, the backup will be quite a lot faster than the printed solution. Assuming about one diskette per minute, inclusive of changing disks, the backup could be complete in less than 3,500 years.
• Now considered somewhat old fashioned, punch cards were once a mainstay of every programmer's personal backups. Like printed hardcopy, anyone familiar with the character encoding used, could read the data without needing any access to a computer. If we assume 80 column cards, we would need 32,400,000,000,000 cards. I would be somewhat concerned about the problem of getting this stack of cards back in the correct order if I dropped it. With a weight of about 30 million tons and stretching perhaps 6 million miles end to end, handling certainly would be challenging and an accident very possible.
• Paper (punched) tape was the only alternative on the first computer I used, a basic early model Elliott 803 without the optional magnetic tape. If I recall correctly, you could manage about 10 characters per inch, so you would need a paper tape over 4,000,000,000 miles long. Hmmm, that would be silly. The other solutions are clearly better.

I am sure other options will be considered, but I just wanted to bring these up in case CERN had failed to consider them

Re:Searching for God

[alienmole]

Find God? which one? Zeus? The Muslim god? The christian god? Dagon? Thor? Endovelicus? The Spaguetti monster? Santa Claus? The tooth fairy?

Geez, haven't you been paying any attention to physics for the last fifty years? Just as atoms (or protons, neutrons and electrons) can be used to create any kind of matter, so the God particle can be used to create any kind of god. Once they isolate the God particle, they'll be able to create a god who actually likes science. Or create a god who isn't always short of cash, so doesn't need to raise money via telethons. Or the ultimate challenge: create a god that doesn't exist.

Re:Backup options

[fatphil]

Nice figures. If they did use 3.5" diskettes, then they'd have to write 1000/1.44 per second or roughly 700/s. Assuming they could be written to instantly, they'd need to move through a single drive at 700*3.5"/s = 224km/h. Assuming you need to get them stationary to write to them, then they'd need a maximum speed of 448km/h to keep up the mean speed. Don't stand in their way...

Of course, the tower of floppies for each day would be 151km high...

No, I don't know what that is in football fields.