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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. WTF? by Retric · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I just hope it can do math...

    "all that energy is compressed into two protons, which are a million times smaller than that annoying bug[Mosquito].

    Hmm, (2/(6.02*10^23grams))/(0.002grams) = 1.66112957 × 10-21 so 2 protons weigh about 1 / (1,700,000,000,000,000,000,000)th as much as those Mosquito's which means it's volume is around that much smaller as well.

    How about length 15 mm vs (10^15 meters) = 1.5 × 10^ -17meters so umm nope.

  2. Could have been in America by SethJohnson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While this camera was developed at the university of Wisconsin, it will be installed at a facility in Geneva, Switzerland.

    We had the opportunity to deploy this in America.

    The Super Conducting Supercollider project in Waxahachie, TX was a federal basic science research project that lost its funding and was dismantled in 1993. The tunnel was dug. All the technological hurdles seemed to be jumpable. But the American people were less than interested in funding stuff that wasn't directly translatable into tastier hamburgers or cooler cars. The Democrat-led congress cancelled the $2 billion budget and America resigned itself to let other countries lead in this field.

    I only mention the 'democrat-led' congress because I do not believe they have earned the slurr of 'tax-and-spend-liberals'. This is one example why.

    --
    $5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
  3. Re:The Whoda Whata by Prendeghast · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I did my experimental particle physics PhD on an experiment named BaBar, you know, like the elephant. Are you telling me that isn't public-friendly?

    A similar experiment based in Japan is called Belle and one in upstate NY called CLEO. One of the other experiments at the LHC is called ATLAS. They all seem reasonably public-friendly names (but then I am one of the folks you are saying don't know what a public-freindly name is, so I suppose my views are irrelevant).

    As to the PR, it's pretty hard to make particle physics accessible to other physicists, let alone the general public. The essence of the question that BaBar and Belle were trying to answer is "Is CP violated in strong interactions?". It generally takes several years of university physics just to understand the question. The most "successful" PR projects never even seem to get to the crux of the project.

    Incidentally, the answer is "yes, maximally". Your tax dollars at work!