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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."
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 .
http://www.hep.wisc.edu/cms/trig/welcome-trigger.h tml
-theGreater.
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. Like NASA is the name of an organization.
LHC = A big particle collider being built at CERN, 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.
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 say the LHC can accellerate particles with huge amount of kinetic energy.
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.
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.
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.
"What the masochist doesn't know can't hurt him."
well...some people do. :D You can easily make the live feed of CDF and D0 from fermilab's tevatron into a simple screensaver. In fact, I rather like mine. :) Sometimes they shut down the feed and just keep cycling the last few frames but that's ok.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"