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Hardware Technology

The World's Fastest Image Processor 156

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the something-to-sort-your-mother's-photo-albums dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "This image processor is not your typical digital camera. It took 6 years, 20 people, and $6 million to build the 'Regional Calorimeter Trigger' (RCT) which will be a component of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of the detectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The RCT will fill several racks of space in order to process 4 trillion bits of information per second while analyzing a billion proton collisions per second. The camera is currently being tested at the University of Wisconsin at Madison before being shipped to Geneva in June to participate in the first experiments in 2007."
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The World's Fastest Image Processor More

The World's Fastest Image Processor

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  • okay, so it takes great pictures! (Score:4, Funny)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) * <yayagu@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:12PM (#14672223) Journal

    What about the call quality?, and text-messaging? And what is the area coverage? What kinds of plans are available?

    Does it play mp3s?

    Can I take videos with it and send to my friends?

    • Does it play mp3s?

      If it doesn't play Ogg Vorbis, I don't want it!

    • WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Retric ( 704075 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:55PM (#14672598)
      I just hope it can do math...

      "all that energy is compressed into two protons, which are a million times smaller than that annoying bug[Mosquito].

      Hmm, (2/(6.02*10^23grams))/(0.002grams) = 1.66112957 × 10-21 so 2 protons weigh about 1 / (1,700,000,000,000,000,000,000)th as much as those Mosquito's which means it's volume is around that much smaller as well.

      How about length 15 mm vs (10^15 meters) = 1.5 × 10^ -17meters so umm nope.
      • i dont think you should account for the neutrons, we are talking only about protons... did you do that? err. im confused.

      • Re:WTF? (Score:5, Informative)

        by pinopino ( 747071 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @07:31PM (#14673765)
        Your calculation is only correct if the bug is the same density as thee mosquito. Fortunately, matter made up of atoms is mostly empty space. Atom size is roughly an Angstrom (10^-10 m), proton size is roughly a Fermi (10^-15 m), so volume (and hence density, since electrons are light) difference is about (10^5)^3 or 10^15, fixing your factor, roughly. Really what is meant by 'area' of the proton is the center of mass cross-section for the proton-proton collision.
        A mosquito with nuclear density would be a heavy bug indeed. And yes, IAAPhysicist.

    • Don't forget the "anti-red-eye" feature! (Score:5, Funny)

      by The_REAL_DZA ( 731082 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:20PM (#14672807)
      Nobody wants to put up a picture of a hundred billion proton collisions with glowing red eyes with their screen saver.
    • So it handles 4*10^12 bits a second. And there are 40*10^6 collisions a second. So (4*10^12*bits*s^-1)/(40*10^6*collisions*s^-1)=100 , 000 bits per collision. Comparitivly to a regular digital camera this is nothing but then again it is processing so much information per second. I wonder how this compares to STAR at RHIC at Brookhaven National Labs [bnl.gov]. I did research into the Rho-Muon at STAR last school year. intresting to see the advancements in computing technology.

      nairb774

  • The Whoda Whata (Score:5, Funny)

    by cdrudge ( 68377 ) * on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:13PM (#14672230) Homepage
    ...to build the 'Regional Calorimeter Trigger' (RCT) which will be a component of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, one of the detectors on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland
    Ah, the RCT for the CMS on the LHC in CH. Why didn't you just say that.

    I still have no idea what a RCT, CMS, or LHC really are and I RTFA.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • CMS is a Content Management System liks PHPnuke or Plone, or Tikiwiki. In laymen's terms it is basically a dynamic webpage that can be setup from scratch in minutes that multiple people can manipulate.

    • Re:The Whoda Whata (Score:5, Informative)

      by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether@@@tru7h...org> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:04PM (#14672685) Homepage
      Ah, the RCT for the CMS on the LHC in CH. Why didn't you just say that.

      IANAPhysicist, but I work in proximity to them. So I know a little bit about this stuff.

      RCT = A device that detects a particle after a collision happens in a particle accelerator, which "triggers" to the connected computer that something interesting happened.
      CMS = Name of the experiment [cmsinfo.cern.ch]. Like NASA is the name of an organization.
      LHC = A big particle collider being built at CERN [web.cern.ch], in Switzerland. Like Fermilab, but bigger.

      Physicists are smart folk, but are hideous at PR. Most of the web pages intended to be a PR front fail miserably, and are indecipherable to anyone except physicists. There was even a movement a few years back to get physicsts to name their experiments in more public-friendly ways, which failed miserably.

      • Re:The Whoda Whata (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Prendeghast ( 658024 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:52PM (#14673055) Homepage

        I did my experimental particle physics PhD on an experiment named BaBar [stanford.edu], you know, like the elephant. Are you telling me that isn't public-friendly?

        A similar experiment based in Japan is called Belle [belle.kek.jp] and one in upstate NY called CLEO [cornell.edu]. One of the other experiments at the LHC is called ATLAS [atlas.ch]. They all seem reasonably public-friendly names (but then I am one of the folks you are saying don't know what a public-freindly name is, so I suppose my views are irrelevant).

        As to the PR, it's pretty hard to make particle physics accessible to other physicists, let alone the general public. The essence of the question that BaBar and Belle were trying to answer is "Is CP violated in strong interactions?". It generally takes several years of university physics just to understand the question. The most "successful" PR projects never even seem to get to the crux of the project.

        Incidentally, the answer is "yes, maximally". Your tax dollars at work!

        • the reason CLEO [cornell.edu] was named thus is because it is penetrated by CESR [cornell.edu]. so i heard, anyway.

      • Some basics on experimental particle physics (Score:4, Informative)

        by arthas ( 654815 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @06:08PM (#14673172)

        Well, I am a physicist and here is some additional information (hopefully not bad PR):

        LHC is the biggest and most powerful particle collider ever built. It is a proton-proton collider that collides proton beams together with 14 TeV (tera electronvolts) center-of-mass energy (if memory serves).

        CMS (= compact muon solenoid) is actually quite big detector. Its main purpose is to find the so called Higgs boson. The existense of the Higgs boson is required by the Standard Model of particle physics (one good book on the basics of particle physics (for people who already understand quite a bit of physics and math) is: Francis Halzen, Alan D. Martin: Quarks and Leptons: An Introductory Course in Modern Particle Physics). CMS, as most other particle physics experiments has an onion-like structure. The innermost layer is called a tracker which is used to (surprise, surprise) find the tracks of the particles produced in the collision. There is also a magnetic field in the tracker so the curvature of the particle tracks can be used to determine their momenta. The next layers are called electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters. These are used to measure the energies of the particles. And finally there are the muon chambers that are used to detect the muons (muon is like an electron but only heavier).

        There are also other big detectors in the LHC experiment like e.g. ATLAS.

        One good source of information on particle physics are CERN summer student lectures [webcast.cern.ch] available in Real-media format.

        • Re:Some basics on experimental particle physics (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether@@@tru7h...org> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @06:54PM (#14673524) Homepage
          (hopefully not bad PR):

          You did fine. ;)

          CMS (= compact muon solenoid) is actually quite big detector. Its main purpose is to find the so called Higgs boson.

          See, that's the sort of thing I was talking about. The CMS home page [cmsinfo.cern.ch] doesn't describe this at ALL. It has a FAQ page.. which promptly goes into details about the construction of the detector and how big it is without ever explaining why the thing is being built. A wikipedia link at the bottom eventually explains it all, but this is a rarity in my experience. It's written for physicists, by physicists.

          Part of the problem I have as a non-physicist is that whenever I have to tell someone where I work, they immediatley want to know what the laboratory does, and why. It's difficult to explain the experiments when all you know is that they're building the biggest magnet ever.

          Eventually my explanations fail to satisfy, and 9 times of 10 the conversation ends with someone asking "and my taxes are paying for that??" Public interest in theoretical research labs is already pretty damn low, and near as I can see a lack of explanation in layman's terms only hurts it further. Most folks are willing to accept that some types of study may never result in something they can buy at the store, but I also think they'd appreciate having a way to understand why it's important anyways.

          • You did fine. ;)

            I'm glad I was able to explain at least something clearly. Maybe there is hope for me yet...

            It indeed seems that the CMS home page is written for physicists or physics students. It basically tells nothing a non-physicist or non-engineer would like to know. This is quite sad.

            The CERN public pages [web.cern.ch] seem to be more newbie-friendly.

            The purpose of these experiments and the importance of the results to our understanding of the universe is indeed important to explain... Not only becau

      • Physicists are smart folk, but are hideous at PR. Most of the web pages intended to be a PR front fail miserably, and are indecipherable to anyone except physicists. There was even a movement a few years back to get physicsts to name their experiments in more public-friendly ways, which failed miserably.

        We figure that after inventing the web we don't really need any more PR. Better to lie low for a while after a mistake that big.
    • I knew it. Reading the articles on Slashdot is useless after all!
    • I'll bet if someone really tried they could put together enough acronyms based on the RCT to spell out RECTAL THERMOMETER. I'm too lazy.

      Join CAT - the Committee to Abolish TLA's*.

      *Three Letter Acronyms.
  • Now everyone can take the very same "pictures" using their computers at home as long as they have double the 5 terabytes of ram needed to run Windows 2k15.

  • obligatory comments (Score:3, Funny)

    by slackaddict ( 950042 ) <rmorgan@NoSPaM.openaddict.com> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:18PM (#14672281) Homepage Journal
    man, imagine a cluster of these.. er, actually, imagine the pr0n you could create!!! w00t! seriously, they could recover the cost of their r&d by using this to post some super high-quality shots of paris hilton! :-)
    • With the processing power that thing has, you could create your own pr0n from scratch. Nevermind taking Paris Hilton's picture, just input her dimensions and make her do whatever you want.

      Actually, now that I think about it, that kinda worries me. I wonder how long it will take before 100% CGI pr0n is created. I shudder to think of the ugliness you could produce with such a thing, such as CGI kiddie pr0n.

      Imagine explaining that to a judge. "No your honor, these are CGI images. All characters appear

    • Re:obligatory comments (Score:4, Funny)

      by maxume ( 22995 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:52PM (#14673049)
      Whoa! You can actually see the individual diseases!
    • they could recover the cost of their r&d by using this to post some super high-quality shots of paris hilton!

      Really? I've never seen a THIN angle lens before.... With this resolution though, you might actually get all 8 pixels of her, so hmm...

    • The only kinda pr0n u can get from this is subatomic pr0n... protons, electrons, neutrons (my knowledge of subatomics ends here) randomly crashing into each other (or mebbe not) and the creation of a few queer quarks ...ok bad joke.

  • 20 people to develop (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:25PM (#14672344)
    something that can tell if the guy in the picture has a hard... oh, it said hadron..nm

  • the liquid cooled sensors will, no doubt, be cooled in beer, then.

  • cheesy article (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:32PM (#14672415)
    Particle physicists have been building logic into triggers for 35 or 40 years. As a point of reference the first Nobel out of the AGS at BNL was in the 60's and triggering in the chambers is what made it happen. This is no more radical and innovative than AMD introducing the Opteron was for the processor industry. Sure it's neat, sure it's state of the art, sure it's challenging. It's not radical, nor stunningly innovative and it's not a freakin' camera. Look at the article -- it's a glorified press release from Madison .

  • It took 6 years (Score:5, Funny)

    by iamhassi ( 659463 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:32PM (#14672420) Journal
    "It took 6 years..."

    so it runs pentium 2s?

  • I'm sure you'll be able to find it integrated into a cell phone and on the racks of Akihabra in about 6 months, where it will then be end-of-lifed in about a week, and replaced with a better model.

  • Say Bye Bye Little Blue Planet (Score:4, Funny)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) * on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:45PM (#14672527) Homepage Journal
    The Higgs-Boson "is one of the last particles we need to complete the standard model of physics," says Klabbers of the well-established model physicists use to explain the behaviors and properties of the smallest units of matter. Scientists have been seeking definitive evidence of the Higgs-Boson for 20 years.

    Discovering the mass of the Higgs-Boson will, of course, shrink the Earth to the size of a pea, which is the fate of most type 13 planets.


  • What they don't tell you is that because it's based on ImageMagick, it will still barf on certain malformed JFIF header blocks.

  • Everyone say "cheese"! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ithika ( 703697 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:52PM (#14672576) Homepage

    It won't stop the top of someone's head from being outside the shot though. Or the other one, the "pot-plant on head" effect.

  • If this is the Compact Muon Experiment (Score:3, Funny)

    by Flying pig ( 925874 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @04:54PM (#14672585)
    How big is the SUV version going to be? There won't be enough room in Switzerland for it.
  • but how many megapixels is it?
  • Very pretty... but does it run Vista?

    -5, Lame joke adaptation
  • It's culling a billion into 50,000. If storage technologies advance enough, you just record everything and sort it out later.

    • Re:Or just increase storage (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Call it a 10^4 reduction. Say you could write the data to tape. You still have to read back 10^4 times as much data to find the "interesting" stuff. It's not just I/O that's a killer, pattern rec and kinematic recon are not free. Sure you could implement the hardware solution in software as a zeroth order data filter -- and then you'll never analyze the data anyway. Rule 1) never take data you are not willing to analyze. As for that notion that maybe you'll take the data and analyze it in the future

  • Testing at UW/Madison? (Score:4, Funny)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:01PM (#14672650) Journal
    You *know* that the first picture is going to be some grad student's ass.
    • What they don't tell you is that the zoom level is fixed at 10000000000000x, so it'll actually be an ass particle.

      They may even get a few asses to collied together and take a pic of whatever that is. It'll be like 1 trillian bits of assyness, but asses move so slow compared to how this thing is designed, that each picture will be identical.

      oh well.
    • As a student of UW Madison, I can assure you, it has already been done. Just another title to add, #1 party school and most impressive picture of someone's ass.
  • The RCT will fill several racks of space in order to process 4 trillion bits of information per second while analyzing a billion proton collisions per second.

    Maybe from the observations made by this device we can find a way to make an Ideal Machine. [wikipedia.org]

  • a billion protons (Score:5, Funny)

    by trb ( 8509 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:05PM (#14672695)
    So I read the slashdot lead, and it says it analyzes a billion proton collisions per second. So I thought, how much stuff is that? I rtfa and it says:
    In the LHC, each pair of colliding protons flying around the collider crashes with the energy of about 14 buzzing mosquitoes -- but all that energy is compressed into two protons, which are a million times smaller than that annoying bug.
    So we know that a proton is a million times smaller than a mosquito (or half a mosquito?). So a billion protons is equivalent to, uh, a thousand mosquitos. I tried: [google.com]http://www.google.com/search?q=1000+mosquitos+to+g rams [google.com] to no avail. Foo on Google calculator. But google search points at pages that mostly claim that a mosquito weighs 2mg or so, so a billion protons (1E9) should weigh 2 grams.

    But I thought that a mole of protons (6E23 protons) weighed 1 gram. So common knowledge and this article are off by several (14?) orders of magnitude. Hmmm. Or are they the same size but very different in mass?

    Or when the author said "a million times smaller," maybe she/he intended "a jillion times smaller."

    • Perhaps they were measuring POUSes - Protons Of Unusual Smallness. Maybe?

      Or a better explanation probably comes from the article editor - "The average Joe can't comprehend something smaller than a mosquito, or a number larger than a million, so substitute those ..."

    • Yes, TFA is indeed quite ambiguous on its numbers.

      The RCT will fill several racks of space in order to process 4 trillion bits of information per second

      Could I get that in Libraries of Congress per fortnight?

      • Could I get that in Libraries of Congress per fortnight?

        Yes. Yes, you can. Four terabits per second is about 1.2 [google.com] exabits per fortnight. There are about 10 terabytes [jamesshuggins.com], or 80 terabits in the Library of Congress. So do the math [google.com], and you get about 16,000 LoC/ftnt.

        Anyone else remember the thread in which the thrust generated by the space shuttle's rocket boosters was measured in (burning) Libraries of Congress?

      • Could I get that in Libraries of Congress per fortnight?

        In addition to Libraries of Congress, I want to see barrels of monkeys [galactic-guide.com] become a standard measurement. Sort of the emotional axis orthogonal to the Libraries of Congress axis in information-space.

        • A game of Settlers of Catan = 0.8 barrels of monkeys
        • Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit = 1.5 barrels of monkeys
        • Cleaning the house = -2.7 barrels of monkeys

        AlpineR

    • Re:a billion protons (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      with the energy of about 14 buzzing mosquitoes -- but all that energy is compressed into two protons, which are a million times smaller than that annoying bug.

      "The power resulting from these collisions is 11,000 watts,"

      A buzzing mosquito should therefore be about 780W! I need to harness a few of this to power my car. Who needs horsepower (735W) when mosquitopower are more powerful.
      • > "The power resulting from these collisions is 11,000 watts,"
        >A buzzing mosquito should therefore be about 780W! I need to harness a few of this to power my car. Who needs horsepower (735W) when >mosquitopower are more powerful.
        Energy!=Power
        Power=Energy/Time
        Energy=Power*Time

        The time taken for the collision is almost an instant. Not sure what the Energy of a "buzzing mosquito" (WTF kind of unit is that?) is.
        Certainly if you had an endless supply of "buzzing mosquito's"(lol), you could run your car
    • 14 orders of magnitude? Pretty close to the national debt, so it's not a big deal. What are you complaining about? Close enough.
    • The article talks about energy not mass. I think they mean with the kinetic energy of 14 mosquitoes. I dont know the speed of the protons colliding, but with special relativistic effects in your calculations a factor of two times as much energy seems a bit low. The mass of a particle increases with its velocity. You wont notice it untill you get close to c, but these protons get close to c. The only particles I can think of who have more kinetic energy are some cosmic ray particles. Take it from me when I s
    • Considering most people don't know of any numbers larger than a million, and the U.S. and U.K. can't even agree how big a billion is, I think they were just simplifying for the masses. Most press releases are quite { funny , embarassing } to people who actually understand what they're talking about.

      And, in a wonderful "pot-kettle-black" moment, you say TFEstimate is off by about 14 orders of magnitude...

      For those of us who studied maths to get degrees in computers, there's really only about a half doze

      • In what system is an order of magnitude defined to be a distinct big-O expression? I took those same maths, and nowhere did they call them orders of magnitude, although we certainly referred to the same expressions. Everything I've ever read and heard has defined an order of magnitude to be a single factor of ten. I invite you to check out this [wikipedia.org] page at Wikipedia (and no, I didn't just edit it now to support what I'm saying).

  • Oh dear! (Score:3)

    by scdeimos ( 632778 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:08PM (#14672717)
    At around $20,000 a board, I really hope that one being held in TFA's photo was dead already.

  • Super Bowl Reviews (Score:2, Insightful)

    by wardk ( 3037 )
    I suspect the Seahawks get an extra touchdown, and the Steelers lose a touchdown if this was in place last sunday.

  • Could have been in America (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:22PM (#14672819) Homepage Journal
    While this camera was developed at the university of Wisconsin, it will be installed at a facility in Geneva, Switzerland.

    We had the opportunity to deploy this in America.

    The Super Conducting Supercollider [hep.net] project in Waxahachie, TX was a federal basic science research project that lost its funding and was dismantled in 1993. The tunnel was dug. All the technological hurdles seemed to be jumpable. But the American people were less than interested in funding stuff that wasn't directly translatable into tastier hamburgers or cooler cars. The Democrat-led congress cancelled the $2 billion budget and America resigned itself to let other countries lead in this field.

    I only mention the 'democrat-led' congress because I do not believe they have earned the slurr of 'tax-and-spend-liberals'. This is one example why.
    • Interestingly, one of the biggest unforeseen hurdles for this project was the fire ants....

      If you live in Texas, you know why.
      • Interestingly, one of the biggest unforeseen hurdles for this project was the fire ants....

        Ah, that's a bunch of hooey. I live in Dallas and spent every spring since '78 in Waxahachie. You get beyond the fire ants once you dig bellow 6'. The SSC tunnels went considerably deeper than that.

        And besides, there's one thing I learned from my misspent youth: want to get rid of a fire ant mound? One gallon of gas and a match do the trick right nice. :)
    • As long as it accepts an international participation, and the results are made public thru peer review, who cares whether this is in america, swityerland or east papouana ? Usually, physics won't care at all in which country the experiement take place as long as they can participate :). And yes, IAAPAQPBWAFMHTPIALE*. Controversy on "where experiement take place" are usually not triggered on science basis but on political basis and partisan issue, on whhich most physicist won't care. Take the example of ITE
  • Imagine a beowolf cluster of these things...
    • "Pamela Klabbers, an associate scientist in the Department of Physics, holds a large parallel processing computer card, one of 300 such cards to be mounted into 18 crates to collectively create a massive image processor"

      It IS a cluster of 300 CPU boards.... ... But will it run Linux <g>
  • i saw one of these at radio shack last week, it was returned and sitting between the ipods and xmods
  • i live right next to it!!!!

    just thought the /. crowd should know that. feel my uber l33tness now

    B-)

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @05:49PM (#14673029)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Damn (Score:2, Funny)

    by eno2001 ( 527078 )
    I bet that thing would really make Halo feel realistic... ;P
  • With the PMA [pmai.org] (the big US camera convention) just around the corner (17 days) if they plan to announce availablity there. Would be really great if I could pick this up at Best Buy by summer time... I also assume that it's got a good macro lens on it.

  • eXtremely Fast Tracker at Fermilab (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The_Wilschon ( 782534 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @06:05PM (#14673155) Homepage
    I'm currently working on a similar project at Fermilab. The eXtremely Fast Tracker (XFT) is a set of electronics which decides, once every 396 nanoseconds, whether or not the particle tracks that we see represent an interesting event that we want to keep, or a boring one that we don't want to bother putting on disk (well, actually tape). We are in the process of upgrading it, because the collision rate has been increasing (technically, the luminosity has been increasing), and the old XFT is not up to handling the now much higher track density. My job is writing software to test the system as it is installed.
    • Here's something I have always wondered about. Doesn't the detector device (ie., CDF) eventually become so radioactive from being that close to the collision point that you just end up seeing particles flying everywhere from both the collision decay and the detector itself? It must get so messy how do you tell the difference!!? Also, when is the tevatron being shut down?
      • Hmmm... The radioactivity generally does not pose a serious problem... I think that when we do cause parts of the detector to become radioactive (eg by beam scraping) that it dissipates fairly quickly. It is intense while it lasts, but brief. However, I am not an expert on this. Also, it is generally not too difficult, at least in the tracking chambers, to tell whether a particle originated at the collision vertex or somewhere else. Now, in the calorimeters and the muon chambers, you could get spurious
        • interesting. I guess by shutdown, I meant..... "the big shutdown".... :( which must be coming down the pike pretty soon I'd imagine. Oh also one more if you please! Can you enter the tunnel AT ALL when the main ring is "charged" and particles are stored in it or is the synchrotron radiation too much of an issue to let people in there? I'm guessing you can't go in. (perhaps its not the synchrotron radiation that's a problem though b/c the protons are so heavy and maybe its because of random residual gas co
          • Yeah, nobody goes in the collision hall or tunnel when we have beam. The issue is occasional, but unpredictable, beam scraping, on collimators and such. When that occurs, for only a few nanoseconds generally, the dose (I don't recall the actual exact dose at the moment) is high enough that 50% of people receiving that radiation dose will die within 30 days. Or so I was told at radiological worker training. Speaking of which... I'll have to renew that sometime soon... garrrrr....

            Yeah, the big shutdown
            • hmm no, when I said "the BIG shutdown" I mean THEE big shutdown, the final shutdown, the shutdown after which there can be no further shutdowns, the closing of the tevatron. I thought this was happening sometime soon after LHC starts up.....
              • No, I actually don't think that the tevatron will be shut down for a good long while after the LHC starts. I could be wrong, but there is certainly useful physics that can be done at Fermilab, even when LHC is running. I mean, there are lots of perfectly fine and useful accelerators other than tevatron currently running, DESY, SLAC, CESR, RHIC, etc.
  • Wasn't that some sort of early warning system that used ground-imaging satellites to estimate the average weight of a human population through the shadows they made while walking outside. The system would send out a warning to the healthd department when a particular threshold level was exceeded.
  • So.... What you're saying is I can take a picture of the DNA of a microbe on the hair of a gnats ass.
  • It's not Overclocked.
  • I feel good about this. No one will ever need more than 4 trillion bits of information per second.

  • Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Indeed (Score:3, Funny)

    by triso ( 67491 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @07:18PM (#14673691) Homepage
    In grade 11 physics we were discussing hadrons and other subatomic particles when the shyest and geekiest girl asks, "How big are these hard-on thingies?" Order was not restored and the class was dismissed a few minutes early.

  • And another part of the CMS/LHC project at UW (Score:4, Informative)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @07:29PM (#14673754)
    200TB of Xserve RAID storage [alienraid.org] (link includes pictures)

    Text of the article:

    The University of Wisconsin - Madison [wisc.edu] has deployed 35 5.6TB Xserve RAID [apple.com] storage arrays in a single research installation as part of an ongoing scientific computing initiative.

    The Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW) [wisc.edu], a partnership between several research departments at the University of Wisconsin, have installed almost 200TB, or 200,000GB, of Xserve RAID arrays.

    As a comparison, 200TB of storage is enough to hold 2.75 years of high definition video, 25,000 full length DVD movies, 323,000 CDs, 20 printed collections of the Library of Congress [loc.gov], or over 1000 [wikipedia.org] Wikipedias [wikipedia.org].

    The GLOW storage installation is physically split between the departments of Computer Sciences [wisc.edu] and High Energy Physics [wisc.edu]. Each Xserve RAID is attached to a dedicated Linux node running Fedora Core [redhat.com] via an Apple Fibre Channel PCI-X Card [apple.com] and is either directly accessed via various mechanisms, such as over the network via gigabit ethernet, or aggregated using tools such as dCache [dcache.org].

    The storage is primarily used to act as a holding area for large amounts of data from experiments such as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) [wisc.edu] and ATLAS [web.cern.ch] experiments at the Large Hadron Collider [web.cern.ch] at CERN [cern.ch].
  • Heck, we could put these things in Japanese schoolgirl's bathrooms and make a friggin' fortune!

  • 500 gigs per second (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Stoutlimb ( 143245 ) on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @07:44PM (#14673846)
    WOW that's 500 gigs per second. I wonder if they process it on the fly and delete it, or if it's stored somehow. I doubt they use serial ATA. How do you even search or make meaningful information out of a data set that large?
    • You write careful searches, optimize your algorithms, and wait.

      I visited Fermi once, and they have a massive facility to archive, search, and process the petabytes of data they create. It was mentioned that if you make a bad search request, it can go off for a month or so.

      There are PhD theses waiting in your last question, if you care to apprentice yourself to the physicists.
    • They indeed process it on the fly, which is the point of the trigger: it "triggers" on the most interesting events, which get stored. Even after triggering, the data set is massive.
  • Sounds like a job for the Cell processor. And I bet you could build it for less than $6M in the process.
    • In fact CMS Event Filter (high-level trigger) is going to use x86 processors (probably intel Xeons). Calculations in the system will be performed using, fot the first time, algorithms and respective software packets originally designed to be used for offline analysis, so a whole framework (mostly C++) is devised around already existing applications for them to be usable in "online" processing. Of course, whole system is from the ground up designed with cross platform in mind.

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