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."

Comments

okay, so it takes great pictures!

[yagu]

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?

The Whoda Whata

[cdrudge]

...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.

obligatory comments

[slackaddict]

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! :-)

Re:obligatory comments

[maxume]

Whoa! You can actually see the individual diseases!

20 people to develop

[Anonymous Coward]

something that can tell if the guy in the picture has a hard... oh, it said hadron..nm

It took 6 years

[iamhassi]

"It took 6 years..."

so it runs pentium 2s?

Say Bye Bye Little Blue Planet

[Baldrson]

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.

Everyone say "cheese"!

[Ithika]

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.

Testing at UW/Madison?

[argStyopa]

You *know* that the first picture is going to be some grad student's ass.

a billion protons

[trb]

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: http://www.google.com/search?q=1000+mosquitos+to+g rams 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."

Don't forget the "anti-red-eye" feature!

[The_REAL_DZA]

Nobody wants to put up a picture of a hundred billion proton collisions with glowing red eyes with their screen saver.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Indeed

[triso]

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.