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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."
I suspect the Seahawks get an extra touchdown, and the Steelers lose a touchdown if this was in place last sunday.
(hopefully not bad PR):
;)
You did fine.
CMS (= compact muon solenoid) is actually quite big detector. Its main purpose is to find the so called Higgs boson.
See, that's the sort of thing I was talking about. The CMS home page doesn't describe this at ALL. It has a FAQ page.. which promptly goes into details about the construction of the detector and how big it is without ever explaining why the thing is being built. A wikipedia link at the bottom eventually explains it all, but this is a rarity in my experience. It's written for physicists, by physicists.
Part of the problem I have as a non-physicist is that whenever I have to tell someone where I work, they immediatley want to know what the laboratory does, and why. It's difficult to explain the experiments when all you know is that they're building the biggest magnet ever.
Eventually my explanations fail to satisfy, and 9 times of 10 the conversation ends with someone asking "and my taxes are paying for that??" Public interest in theoretical research labs is already pretty damn low, and near as I can see a lack of explanation in layman's terms only hurts it further. Most folks are willing to accept that some types of study may never result in something they can buy at the store, but I also think they'd appreciate having a way to understand why it's important anyways.
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?