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"Evolution of the Internet" Powers Massive LHC Grid
jbrodkin brings us a story about the development of the computer network supporting CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which will begin smashing particles into one another later this year. We've discussed some of the impressive capabilities of this network in the past.
"Data will be gathered from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which hosts the collider in France and Switzerland, and distributed to thousands of scientists throughout the world. One writer described the grid as a 'parallel Internet.' Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid, which oversees the US infrastructure for the LHC network, describes it as an 'evolution of the Internet.' New fiber-optic cables with special protocols will be used to move data from CERN to 11 Tier-1 sites around the globe, which in turn use standard Internet technologies to transfer the data to more than 150 Tier-2 centers. Worldwide, the LHC computing grid will be comprised of about 20,000 servers, primarily running the Linux operating system. Scientists at Tier-2 sites can access these servers remotely when running complex experiments based on LHC data, Pordes says. If scientists need a million CPU hours to run an experiment overnight, the distributed nature of the grid allows them to access that computing power from any part of the worldwide network"
I mean, if even the supporting computer network is smashing particles into each other it's got to be 133+!
How many Skynet jokes can it generate on demand?
Q: You know what Google does when they need to shift large amounts of data?
A: They courier it.
I'd like to be able to vote for CERN in the upcoming US election.
Hmmm... Just wait till this gets turned into a botnet... Oh, wait, it runs Linux. I guess we're safe.
The LHC has generated so much hype that it is now more hyped than Star Wars Episode I. Leading entertainment columnists fear it may create so much mass (hysteria) that it will implode into a singularity, a black hole (like Britney Spears).
One thing's for sure, you can expect nothing to happen until one LHC worker stabs another and a friend intervenes to slice the murderer in half and send him down into the collider!
I suppose this will all be raw sensor data from the LHC itself, right? Must be a bitch to get anything meaningfull out of it.
Is the birth of Skynet, and will be the death of us all. (and scratch the ladies in the subject; forgot for a second what site this was...)
788652 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 19 x 1153
Don't you know God created the Internet through Intelligent design?
box of empty, stupid punch-man
You know, we're going through all this, and we're still not anywhere near closer to coming up with a machine that does anti-gravity, alter the strong force or increase the weak. We can utilize electromagnetism better than the other forces, but as a rule, the ability to control one of the most fundamental forces of nature utterly eludes us. Basically, physics is a total failure, and that's why there's no flying cars or nuclear fusion...
This is my sig.
...did it have a "Vista capable" sticker?
...from SCO Germany, trying to get them to buy 20,000 SCOSource licenses.
This is exactly the sort of asshattery I would expect from an organization headed by Ralph Yarro and Darl McBride.
"The LHC collisions will produce 10 to 15 petabytes of data a year"
The collisions will produce much more data, but "only" 15 PB of that will be permanently stored. That's a stack of CDs 20km high. Every. Year.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It won't be a parallel internet until it too is saturated with porn.
(Unless it's like the parallel Goatee Universe in ST:TOS. In which case all the women will be dressed opaquely from head to toe? Or they will all have beards?)
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
It would be the end of the world as we know it.....
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
"...the distributed nature of the grid allows them to access that computing power from any part of the worldwide network..." Should be soon.
Besides the obvious cool factor (I recall back when earning my undergrad how a fellow student was so excited he could compile Firefox in under 10 hours by using a grid he set up in one of the labs) of being able to crunch massive amounts of data very, very quickly, I'm curious what sorts of applications could use this effectively? Will it be limited to strictly scientific research? Can some of those CPU cycles be sold off to for-profit corporations?
Will pixar be able to render their movies overnight now?
-- Kimball
www.kimballlarsen.com
But how well does it play Cyrsis at full settings?
Oh wait ofc it does, youve basically got science which is fundamentally open source.
Then youve got a bunch of scientists who are fundamentally geeks
And its all being setup in Europe, which isnt as under the grip of MS
As a bonus
They need to ability to look back and explain all their analysis which means they have to see the source
It costs a hell of a lot to get the data so they dont want to loose any data anywhere.
They have a lot of results to analyse so they dont want to be waiting for the server to come back on-line.
Could they of gone with BSD? probably, but most science tools are developed for linux.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Facetious. To. The. Core.
Will it blend?
Actually not all of it is offline. One of the things I have a research grant for is to develop a realtime remote farm for monitoring the detector. This is to catch subtle detector problems quickly before we end up collecting 2 weeks of useless data.
For the Tier 1 a significant fraction of the data is raw 'sensor' (we call it detector) data. This allows reconstruction program converts the data into physics objects like electrons, muons, jets etc.) to be rerun on the data once bugs in the initial reconstruction program have been fixed.
At first, I read that as Goatse Universe... *shudders*
Hey, it's one of those good botnets we just heard about!
Perhaps we should give equal time to an alternate post about the Intelligent Design of the Internet.
You know, we're going through all this, and we're still not anywhere near closer to coming up with a machine that does anti-gravity
How do you know this? One possibility is that there are more that 3 space dimensions. If this is the case AND the LHC has enough energy to access them we could well end up being able to study quantum gravity at the LHC. This might not give is flying cars but in order to first utilize something it is neccessary to understand it.
Basically, physics is a total failure, and that's why there's no flying cars or nuclear fusion...
It depends on what you think the goals of physics are. As a physicist myself I would define them as "to understand how the Universe works". While we still have a long way to go physics has by no means been a failure in that regard. We understand far more about how the Universe works than we did 50 or 100 years ago. Whether or not we can produce flying cars or fusion reactors depends on HOW the Universe works. To say that physics is a failure because these things are extremely hard to produce would be like saying that Columbus' expedition was a total failure because he didn't get to India. You cannot complain physics is a failure just because the Universe does not work the way that YOU want it to - we study the laws of physics, we don't get to make them.....although it would be interesting if we could!
Complete with black hole in the centre...now I have to go disinfect my brain.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
What a lot of people don't know is that if you want to join a cluster to the Open Science Grid and you are a legit organization more than likely they would let you join. Just be sure you understand your responsibilities as it's more of an active participation. If you are a school or computer user group/club go to the open science grid website and start reading up.
Warning: Although not for this crowd. Joining OSG (http://www.opensciencegrid.org/) is a bit more complicated than loading up BOINC or folding@home. It requires a stack of middleware that is distributed as part of OSG's software. Most of the sites I believe use Condor (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/). If you would like to get Condor up and running quick the best way is using ROCKS (http://www.rocksclusters.org/wordpress/) with a Rocks Condor "Roll" (jargon for Rocks condor cluster). Then after getting your condor flock up and running you can load the Open Science Grid stuff on it.
I'm currently running a small cluster of PC's that were destined to be excessed (P4's 3 or 4 years old) and have seen jobs come in and process on my computers! And...to boot you can configure BOINC to act as a backfill mechanism so that when the systems are not running jobs from OSG they can be running BOINC and whatever project you've joined through that project.
BTW...all of the software mentioned is funded under grants from the National Science Foundation - primarily via the Office of CyberInfrastructure but some through other Directorates within NSF.
... turn the Earth into a black hole.
Or intelligent design? You decide!
It wasn't very black...
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
...the Open Science Grid, which oversees the U.S. infrastructure for the LHC network
Wrong. Caltech oversees the infrastructure for the US LHC network. The OSG provides the middleware and grid operations center for the computing and storage resources in the US that are part of the LHC experiments. The OSG does not manage or oversee communications networks.
The party in street And reports and and repor*ts and The failure of W00T
Practically speaking, trickle-down technology of the sort mentioned in the article is one of the main reasons basic research on this massive scale even has a chance of getting funded with taxpayer dollars. Looking for the Higgs, supersymmetry, and a color glass condensate is cool (important!) scientifically, but it is hard to justify spending 10 billion dollars without some pragmatic output. I'm a high energy physicist by training and would like to think these projects could get funded on their own scientific merit, but I suspect funding agencies would disagree; regardless, technology offshoots of this sort are definitely a good thing.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
The on-site data centres at CERN are actually terrible when it comes to cooling (at least they were when I went there). I was expecting the server rooms to be low-ceilinged rooms with AC units good enough to keep the rooms at least chilly, but they were actually swelteringly hot, and one of them seemed to be in an old warehouse with very high ceilings.
Their Seti@home team is going to be hard to beat :(
...and ISPs are worried about the bandwidth requirements of file sharers ;)
Outsourcing has so many benefits: 1) Cost Savings 2) Time Zone Benefits 3) Quick Turn Around Time 4) Standardizing Business Processes and many more.... http://www.outsourcewebsite.com/
They're actually connecting to the fucking internet!?!?!
who gave them their degrees?
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.