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

How about some more hardware details?

[theGreater]

http://www.hep.wisc.edu/cms/trig/welcome-trigger.h tml

-theGreater.

Re:WTF?

[pinopino]

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.