Highlights from the CHEP Conference

mlp68 writes "This is from the floor of the 'Computing in High-Energy Physics' conference in Interlaken, Switzerland, which has been going on this week and closes today. Computer experts and scientists from large physics experiments around the world discussed their work and progress on various fronts. Data logging rates of 100's of MB/s and Linux farms with 100's or 1000's of machines are standard fare. Most of the talks presented, as well as today's summary talks, are available online. An interesting tidbit is that one experiment is now using P2P technology to configure their data acquisition components faster than was possible before."

Comments

Re:Astrophysics implications

[going_the_2Rpi_way]

As the article says, it seems to me that HPC and clusters in general are now standard fare for researchers in every field. The cost and availability of hardware is no longer really the issue (although there will always be the escalation) so much as the human resources component. I suspect the ability to program, QA/QC and interpret the massive amounts of inputs, code and results required to use these clusters to their potential is really becoming the limiting factor.

QCD getting their dedicated computers

[b2u]

A chip optimized to do QCD calculations (QCDOC QCD on Chip) has been developed and parallel computers using that chip are being built. More details can be found here. Machines are being built by the U.S., U.K. and Japan. The U.S. and Japaneese machines will be located at Brookhaven National Lab Computing Facilty which is close to Columbia University where the QCDOC was developed.