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

Could have been in America

[SethJohnson]

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.