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The World's Fastest Image Processor
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."
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?
I still have no idea what a RCT, CMS, or LHC really are and I RTFA.
Nothing else could process as quickly as Ninnle Linux.
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.
Nothing more to say here.
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! :-)
ConsultingFair.com
the liquid cooled sensors will, no doubt, be cooled in beer, then.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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 .
so it runs pentium 2s?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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.
http://www.hep.wisc.edu/cms/trig/welcome-trigger.h tml
-theGreater.
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.
Seastead this.
What they don't tell you is that because it's based on ImageMagick, it will still barf on certain malformed JFIF header blocks.
The what? Large *WHAT* colliding??
Oh... sorry, carry on.
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.
the layman's guide to computer science
How big is the SUV version going to be? There won't be enough room in Switzerland for it.
Pining for the fjords
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.
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.
You *know* that the first picture is going to be some grad student's ass.
-Styopa
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.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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."
That's a lot of TLA's
At around $20,000 a board, I really hope that one being held in TFA's photo was dead already.
I suspect the Seahawks get an extra touchdown, and the Steelers lose a touchdown if this was in place last sunday.
Nobody wants to put up a picture of a hundred billion proton collisions with glowing red eyes with their screen saver.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
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 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.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
it's well known that britons drink warm beer because their refrigerators are made by lucal electric.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these things...
i saw one of these at radio shack last week, it was returned and sitting between the ipods and xmods
just thought the /. crowd should know that. feel my uber l33tness now
B-)
Menya zovut Shnur
Cuz it works out to 50000$ a year. That's just about average in Montreal for a college degree.
Just imagine what you could make with this baby... I mean, um...
The 800mhz iMac is nearly 30% faster than this processor on a hand picked benchmarking suite of photoshop filters.
It's all a myth!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I bet that thing would really make Halo feel realistic... ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
With the PMA (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.
My Sig is better than your Sig, because my Sig is Mine!
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.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
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 available in Real-media format.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
So.... What you're saying is I can take a picture of the DNA of a microbe on the hair of a gnats ass.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
It's not Overclocked.
I feel good about this. No one will ever need more than 4 trillion bits of information per second.
You would think they would make her hold that board with some gloves on or something. She might get some fuzzy blue sweater mass (FBSM) stuck in the Pertinax.
AlpineR
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.
200TB of Xserve RAID storage (link includes pictures)
Text of the article:
The University of Wisconsin - Madison has deployed 35 5.6TB Xserve RAID storage arrays in a single research installation as part of an ongoing scientific computing initiative.
The Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW), 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, or over 1000 Wikipedias.
The GLOW storage installation is physically split between the departments of Computer Sciences and High Energy Physics. Each Xserve RAID is attached to a dedicated Linux node running Fedora Core via an Apple Fibre Channel PCI-X Card and is either directly accessed via various mechanisms, such as over the network via gigabit ethernet, or aggregated using tools such as dCache.
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) and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Heck, we could put these things in Japanese schoolgirl's bathrooms and make a friggin' fortune!
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?
Sounds like a job for the Cell processor. And I bet you could build it for less than $6M in the process.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
... my hadron is bigger than one millionth of the size of a mosquito.
All this just to run the Havok engine?
So, should we replace TLAs with FLLAs
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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 ITER example...
*I Am A Physicist, Actually A Quantum Physicist, But Went Away From My Homeland To Participate In An Long Experiment.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
...it can take a picture of a woman with her mouth SHUT !!!
i was just wondering about "the particle that
.. higgs too? so just find the ... higgs?
gives mass to the other particles". so this is
the important particle everybody wants because
then we just have to find a way to create
it cheap and then we get all sorts of new technology
like the "replicator" ("earl gray tea hot") in star
trek -and- if we build one big enough we can
have it replicate all sorts of stuff ("one concord
please" -or- "one space ship enterprise please").
then again if you could "reverse the process"
of two protons colliding, e.g. have all the
generated particle fly backwards to the collision source
you would get a
"cheapest" collison event with as little neutrons as
possible (neutrons are hard to steer/move/manipulat)
and "reverse" that to get a
very interessting but i'm a lazy person.
have fun! and good luck!
Large Hadron ... hmmm.. None checks typos here? :-)
No thanks. Any other country except that PMITA hellhole, please. Keep your freedoms to yourselves, I don't want any of it.
When I read this article i pictured an array of styrofoam cups. After all, they do make excellent calorimeters.
For a country that's struggling to graduate more engineers and scientists, a program like this provides more support and incentive for students pursuing these degrees. The employees at a supercollider aren't just the principal scientists. There are also hundreds of lab tech jobs to be filled by grad students and PHd candidates.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
4 trillion bits of information per second - I take to mean samples per second, and prolly in Bytes. Images every 25 nanoseconds is pretty clear.
:>
4E12 * 25E-9 = 100E3 pixels per image.
Now, 0.1 MPixel don't sound too impressive until you take into account the 40 MHz framerate which is just a tad bit better than your average 24 Hz movie.
Besides the camera, the real power in this thing is the processing required to make a decision, whether or not to keep that image, every 25 ns. And the 5 GSample of full speed (4 TS/s) RAM required to buffer the chosen 50,000 images before getting stored on that large HDD array they have.
Evan