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The World's Fastest Image Processor

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on 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."

3 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. The Whoda Whata by cdrudge · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...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.
  2. 20 people to develop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    something that can tell if the guy in the picture has a hard... oh, it said hadron..nm

  3. a billion protons by trb · · Score: 5, Funny
    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."