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

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.

20 people to develop

[Anonymous Coward]

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

How about some more hardware details?

[theGreater]

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

-theGreater.

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."

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.

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.