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

okay, so it takes great pictures!

[yagu]

What about the call quality?, and text-messaging? And what is the area coverage? What kinds of plans are available?

Does it play mp3s?

Can I take videos with it and send to my friends?

The Whoda Whata

[cdrudge]

...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

Ah, the RCT for the CMS on the LHC in CH. Why didn't you just say that.

I still have no idea what a RCT, CMS, or LHC really are and I RTFA.

Re:The Whoda Whata

[Xzzy]

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.

Re:The Whoda Whata

[Prendeghast]

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!

obligatory comments

[slackaddict]

man, imagine a cluster of these.. er, actually, imagine the pr0n you could create!!! w00t! seriously, they could recover the cost of their r&d by using this to post some super high-quality shots of paris hilton! :-)

Re:obligatory comments

[maxume]

Whoa! You can actually see the individual diseases!

20 people to develop

[Anonymous Coward]

something that can tell if the guy in the picture has a hard... oh, it said hadron..nm

cheesy article

[Anonymous Coward]

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 .

It took 6 years

[iamhassi]

"It took 6 years..."

so it runs pentium 2s?

How about some more hardware details?

[theGreater]

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

-theGreater.

Say Bye Bye Little Blue Planet

[Baldrson]

The Higgs-Boson "is one of the last particles we need to complete the standard model of physics," says Klabbers of the well-established model physicists use to explain the behaviors and properties of the smallest units of matter. Scientists have been seeking definitive evidence of the Higgs-Boson for 20 years.

Discovering the mass of the Higgs-Boson will, of course, shrink the Earth to the size of a pea, which is the fate of most type 13 planets.

Everyone say "cheese"!

[Ithika]

It won't stop the top of someone's head from being outside the shot though. Or the other one, the "pot-plant on head" effect.

WTF?

[Retric]

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.

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.

Testing at UW/Madison?

[argStyopa]

You *know* that the first picture is going to be some grad student's ass.

a billion protons

[trb]

So I read the slashdot lead, and it says it analyzes a billion proton collisions per second. So I thought, how much stuff is that? I rtfa and it says:

In the LHC, each pair of colliding protons flying around the collider crashes with the energy of about 14 buzzing mosquitoes -- but all that energy is compressed into two protons, which are a million times smaller than that annoying bug.

So we know that a proton is a million times smaller than a mosquito (or half a mosquito?). So a billion protons is equivalent to, uh, a thousand mosquitos. I tried: http://www.google.com/search?q=1000+mosquitos+to+g rams to no avail. Foo on Google calculator. But google search points at pages that mostly claim that a mosquito weighs 2mg or so, so a billion protons (1E9) should weigh 2 grams.

But I thought that a mole of protons (6E23 protons) weighed 1 gram. So common knowledge and this article are off by several (14?) orders of magnitude. Hmmm. Or are they the same size but very different in mass?

Or when the author said "a million times smaller," maybe she/he intended "a jillion times smaller."

Don't forget the "anti-red-eye" feature!

[The_REAL_DZA]

Nobody wants to put up a picture of a hundred billion proton collisions with glowing red eyes with their screen saver.

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.

Some basics on experimental particle physics

[arthas]

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.

Re:Some basics on experimental particle physics

[Xzzy]

(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.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Indeed

[triso]

In grade 11 physics we were discussing hadrons and other subatomic particles when the shyest and geekiest girl asks, "How big are these hard-on thingies?" Order was not restored and the class was dismissed a few minutes early.

And another part of the CMS/LHC project at UW

[daveschroeder]

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.