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CERN Collider To Trigger a Data Deluge
slashthedot sends us to High Productivity Computing Wire for a look at the effort to beef up computing and communications infrastructure at a number of US universities in preparation for the data deluge anticipated later this year from two experiments coming online at CERN. The collider will smash protons together hoping to catch a glimpse of the subatomic particles that are thought to have last been seen at the Big Bang. From the article: "The world's largest science experiment, a physics experiment designed to determine the nature of matter, will produce a mountain of data. And because the world's physicists cannot move to the mountain, an army of computer research scientists is preparing to move the mountain to the physicists... The CERN collider will begin producing data in November, and from the trillions of collisions of protons it will generate 15 petabytes of data per year... [This] would be the equivalent of all of the information in all of the university libraries in the United States seven times over. It would be the equivalent of 22 Internets, or more than 1,000 Libraries of Congress. And there is no search function."
I hope they're planning on running their own fiber optic line across the Atlantic, or shipping a lot of hard drives, cause thats too much data to pass over the public internet.
FYI 15 petabytes per year = 120 petabits per year = 120,000,000 gigabits per year
120,000,000 gigabits per year / ~30,000,000 seconds per year = 4gbps of continuous transmission. They could run a fiber across the Atlantic that could handle 4gbps.
Have you read that article? Firstly, what you say exa, is peta really. But, according to me the size of the internet is the available data through internet. And my emails are not available through the web (hopefully). And while the data transmitted through the network is redundant and huge part of it worthless data (eg. my post), this experiment will give us an enormous amount of meaningful, therefore valuable data.
So long as it's not needed right now pretty much any amount of data can be transmitted.
Remember, this data can only get out per the size of CERNs Internet pipe(s) - so even if they have, say 5 10Gig-Ethernet connections - that's not much effect on big OC backbones. I'm just guessing, but I don't think CERN has HTTP/FTP servers right on a OC Internet backbone, or the server structure (think magnitudes greater than Google's) to drive the data.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
That line is some of the worst hyperbole ever. Here's why. First, there was (almost by definition) no one there to 'see' anything at the Big Bang. (Supernatural explanations aside, and this purports to be a science article.) Second, these subatomic particles are formed frequently in nature, as high-energy astronomy has found various natural particle accelerators that are FAR more powerful than anything we're likely to build on Earth.
One hopes the author will do better next time.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
What I mean by "discarding non-interesting stuff" is not actually delete the data from disk. If this were the case, what need would be for 15 PB of storage ? The thing is that what the LHC people (and the whole physics community) want very badly is some signature of new physics. That means either Higgs, or supersymmetric partners of known particles, or even microscopic black holes (most people are skeptical about that, but look anyway at: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?r awcmd=f+a+thomas+and+giddings&FORMAT=WWW&SEQUENCE=
to see how many times it has been cited. That gives an idea of how many papers have been written on the subject)
The "non-interesting stuff" will be used to improve current limits on experimental data, but if nothing genuinely new will be found it is very likely that the LHC will be the last large particle accelerator ever built.