CERN, the Big Bang and Impact On the IT Industry

whencanistop writes "ComputerWeekly have put together a nice short guide (with lots of links) of what is going on at CERN. They've got a nice slant though on what this big bang experiment is going to mean for the IT Industry. Interesting slant on the world's largest grid and the database clustering technology that they are using. They have also picked up on the amusing rap video by CERN's scientists that has been wandering around YouTube."

Comments

We need more evil scientists

[David Gerard]

Mad scientists are way too nice and sweet-natured these days. We need more evil geniuses. Who'll do things like run the Large Hardon Collider on Vista.

(Okay, that's too evil. They can run it on Google Chrome.)

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

man, can we ever escape the microsoft bash? it's stale. really stale. i guess it sucks not to have an imagination.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[David Gerard]

Nah, a bully on the way down is always great comedy material. Gimme some for Apple and I'll see what I can do.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[phantomAI]

I'm not looking forward to being sucked into the Black Space of Death.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[tysonedwards]

People bash Microsoft for one simple reason... They have an amazing ability to find truly new and unique ways of screwing up on a daily basis, and then telling the world "that isn't a bug, that is a feature." They have taken the act of writing software, elevated it to an artform, got cocky with the whole elitist attitude that comes with wold domination and now finds it's glory days a distant memory. More and more often, their products wind up being stripped of highly touted functionality, is horribly rushed to the point that quality suffers drastically, subject to random crashes and failures that are impossible for your average user to repair, and in turn is only fixed months if not years after the fact through major redesigns. Of course there is something to be said for being first to market, but they have lost consumer good will making their purchases more a matter of necessity of immediacy instead of legitimate desire, even by Microsoft's own admission through their discussions on the 360 and Vista's launch failures.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

Mad scientists are way too nice and sweet-natured these days. We need more evil geniuses.

Ah, brilliant idea. Who else here would like to see what Dr. Horrible could do with the LHC...? C'mon, hands up, one... two... three... four...

Re:We need more evil scientists

[David Gerard]

Sucka MC. My Zune Hadron weighs a ton!

Re:We need more evil scientists

[GweeDo]

Do you want to destroy the world?
-ACCEPT- -DENY-

Re:We need more evil scientists

[The End Of Days]

There's a difference between "great comedy material" and repeating the same damn joke 18,000 times a day. Of course since this site is populated by nerds, the social skills needed to understand that are lacking.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[David Gerard]

Are you saying Linux w33n0rs smell faintly of cat piss and have a nerdy, braying laugh?

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

My large HARD-ON collider only runs on big (m)asses.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[David Gerard]

My large hardon collider pushes large, energised hardons through a ring repeatedly, faster and faster, as smoothly and tightly as possible, until they clash and spray matter in all directions.

... What?

Re:We need more evil scientists

[IdleTime]

Nope...
I have to deal with morons trying to run big business critical databases on Windows on almost daily basis and the OS is so badly unsuited for the task that there should be a bounty on those who sold them the solution.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Anne_Nonymous]

-Accept-

Abort, Retry, Fail?

Re:We need more evil scientists

[X0563511]

Yes, because stereotyping a whole website's pool of users is 100% accurate. Asshole, I happen to have a sense of humor, cleanse regularly, and hell I even go outside and do things with non-nerds!

Re:We need more evil scientists

[sorak]

Mad scientists are way too nice and sweet-natured these days. We need more evil geniuses. Who'll do things like run the Large Hardon Collider on Vista.

Is that why the world hasn't ended yet? Is the LHC still waiting for someone to click "Unblock"?

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Bat Country]

I believe you have something in common with Sir Mixalot.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[exley]

man, can we ever escape the microsoft bash? it's stale. really stale. i guess it sucks not to have an imagination.

I'm with ya, AC. Most of the MS jokes are lame indeed, but unfortunately that nonsense is here to stay because there are far too many people here who get a huge hadron when they bash MS.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[nih]

Do you want to destroy the world?
-ACCEPT-

there, fixed it for you

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Klaus_1250]

It's is not a MS joke, it is a Vista-one. There is a difference and there is nothing wrong with bashing Vista.

I could post my own horror-stories about Vista, but I guess most people who touched Vista will have enough of their own. And you will not hear me bash XP. XP wasn't perfect, it still isn't perfect, it wasn't safe, it still isn't safe and never will be really safe, but it is and has been good enough for me not to bash XP or MS.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Drantin]

Traitor!

Re:We need more evil scientists

[cizoozic]

How about a nice game of chess?

Re:We need more evil scientists

[dogdick]

I heard it was running on Microsoft Mojave...

Re:We need more evil scientists

[asg1]

It appears you are trying to destroy the world. Would you like some assistance?

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

I like XP well enough and hate Vista, based on my experience with both. Granted, the XP is on a ThinkPad and the Vista on a HP desktop, so that may enter into it some way or interaction I don't understand.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[David Gerard]

I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will surely go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, that will be all fixed with $NEXT_VERSION. And theyâ(TM)ll finally be ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF. Also there will be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. Itâ(TM)ll be awesome!

I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[David Gerard]

Quick! Call the Emergency Response Squad!

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

Overrated? Coward moderator.

Re:We need more evil scientists

[sir fer]

MS has bash? No wonder it sucks, they should use SSH

Re:We need more evil scientists

[Anonymous Coward]

Three words:

Simpsons Rake Gag: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Feare

Sys Admin at CERN

[bgibby9]

What a sweet posting that would be. "OK people, we need another Terawatt of power, let's kick in the batteries!"

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Gromius]

trust me its not fun. Physicists are demanding, require unreasonable ungodly amounts of storage and computing power and will do whater the hell they like with it, usally fecking up the system in new and interesting ways. Even the grid isnt enough, we could use more cpu. I'm a physicist at cern (posting from the CMS control room, was there yestarday, twas exciting) and I wouldnt want to be my sys admin ;)

Incidently offtopic, the LHC is down at the moment and has been all day. Apparently its something about a lost patrol.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[David Gerard]

And sysadminning for scientists is a goddamn nightmare. I'd just like you to imagine expert Fortran programmers who can't actually work a computer. And are way smarter than you in every way except ones that involve communicating with humans.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Tsunayoshi]

I concur...where I work our 5 man unix team supports about 400 engineers of various types (mechanical, electrical, computer scientists, aerospace, etc.) and they are a needy little bunch.

never want to follow the processes, always want it now, refuse to let us do any IT analysis of their computing needs, refuse to use the ticketing system.

Frustrating to say the least.

Another place I worked one of the VMS computer operators told me a story where she was fixing a problem for a scientist and paused for a few seconds to review what she was doing in her mind before typing in a command..the scientist looked her in the eye and told her "you just wasted 13 seconds of my time." Her response was she would have wasted his entire day if her command had taken down the cluster...

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[networkconsultant]

So did they turn up in WWII? Or have they been launched into a parallel Kazula & Klien dimension? That being said have you decided upon a nomenclature for these extra dimensions that are just laying around? Personally I like rainbows.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear, another trumped up admin that thinks he owns the company. You are there to provide services to the business / research people. You are supposed to facilitate their needs, however dumb.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[nomadic]

And sysadminning for scientists is a goddamn nightmare. I'd just like you to imagine expert Fortran programmers who can't actually work a computer. And are way smarter than you in every way except ones that involve communicating with humans.

Wow, when a sysadmin complains about someone else being bad at communicating with humans, that's saying something.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

You should buy more super computer clusters.

Disclaimer: I may work for a company who already built some of the clusters at CERN...

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone is there to provide services to the business - the admins, the scientists, engineers, HR personnel, janitors, CEO, everyone.

In this case, it sounds like the admins are trying to do a professional job while up against some prima-donna users.

Oh, and admins are generally not there to service any need, however dumb. You must work in a strange place my friend, a very strange place indeed.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[The End Of Days]

I laugh at admins. It's always amusing to see someone abuse such a tiny amount of power.

It all stems from the lack of understanding that the servers are not an end unto themselves - but if admins were capable of abstract understanding, they wouldn't be script monkeys whose sole purpose in life is to restart computers every now and again.

Yeah, that's mean, but I stand by it. There are approximately 15 admins in the world who actually do their job the way it should be done. The rest are busy building their little air conditioned fiefdoms so they can lord at least one thing over somebody else in their lives.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Gromius]

I think you now start to see the extent of the problem. Seriously the sys admins are the outgoing ones at my work :)

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[dkf]

There are approximately 15 admins in the world who actually do their job the way it should be done.

I didn't know we employed the whole world supply of competent admins here!

Here's why admins get stroppy. Explaining to the Vice Chancellor (or CEO) why the main website went down for 2 days is never easy, and when the explanation comes down to some lowly physics grad student wanting things done without heed for consequences, the experience is excruciating. Hence admins tend to prefer very strongly to keep things working that are currently working, and they dislike that most users have absolutely no idea what actually constitutes a "small change" on a highly-shared system.

OTOH, most users aren't a problem. If you're getting strop in your direction, maybe just maybe it's you that ought to reconsider?

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Gromius]

No I'm with the parent. And I'm coming for the user/scientist side. The admins at scientific labs like CERN are basically doing a heroic job despite the best efforts of their users to be as awkward as possible.

He's right, its almost impossible to get physicists to do what you want and by god if it goes down theres hell to pay, even if it *them* who brought it down doing something the admins told them not to. Admins cant really lock anything down and if they try to its circumvented and/or bitterly complained about. Plus they have to allow the user to run whatever programs they want as they mainly use (very poorly written) custom code. It all boils down to physicists being obsessed about their research to the point that getting it done is the *most important* thing and all else pales into significance.

Again I mention that I'm physicist and I know I'm guilty of this, I've taken down the UK particle physics cluter farm (the tier 1 in grid speak) but these days I usually buy them a beer afterwards to make up for it.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[steelfood]

Apparently its something about a lost patrol.

Maybe the ninjas have infiltrated.

Back on topic, the job of a sysadmin is never easy. There's a very little difference between developers and scientists, the big being that developers tend to know what they're doing so that they don't create small fuck ups, but since they know what they're doing, they end up creating big ones when it does happen. Developers are equally as demanding resource-wise, especially doing database development.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[alexborges]

This is, sadly, mostly true. However there arent only 15 good admins: we are a minority, but we arent that few.

Actually, the more entrenched one is with the FOSS comunity, the more contact one has had with experienced older bofhs and, as a general rule, the better admin one is.

Now.... the only other point Ill have to disagree in is your saying that sysadmining somehow requires no creativity or is not a valuable skill. Neither of those are true: its a challenging intelectual activity and a fun thing to be doing in any case.

Getting software systems to work together (properly) towards an end is good engineering. The best place where youll see that is in performance anlysis: most DBAs cant tell a bit from a byte and have no idea about how is data stored in a hardrive: they do performance-by-magazzione, in which they go ahead and purchase whatever oracle tells them to and call that "creative colaborative thinking".

A good sysadmin, on the other hand, should be able to tell you exactly where you need to put your buck to get an X performance increase: thats not easy at all, wildly it changes depending on the app and nobody even thinks about going ahead and doing it anymore (they go out and buy bigger iron and if THAT wont work, then they think they need a "better" DB, when the problem can perfectly be related to the ammount of memory, ammount of processor, poor use of this or that library...etc.

Hey... even librarians have fun.... if they are any good.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

never want to follow the processes, always want it now, refuse to let us do any IT analysis of their computing needs, refuse to use the ticketing system.

I fail to see the difference between your (l)users and the vast majority of non-technical users out there.

The only difference I've ever seen supporting PHDs is they seem to: think they know how to solve the issue themselves and think fixing any computing problem should be easy.

Though, even those traits aren't entirely unique to the egghead crowd.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm physicist and I know I'm guilty of this, I've taken down the UK particle physics cluter farm (the tier 1 in grid speak) but these days I usually buy them a beer afterwards to make up for it.

And that's why they drink with you, and not the other people posting in this thread!

You almost certainly get more and better service from the IT department, too. Nobody likes being treated like their work isn't important.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

Another place I worked one of the VMS computer operators told me a story where she was fixing a problem for a scientist and paused for a few seconds to review what she was doing in her mind before typing in a command..the scientist looked her in the eye and told her "you just wasted 13 seconds of my time." Her response was she would have wasted his entire day if her command had taken down the cluster...

The proper response to the scientist is "This would affect me how?" followed up by "I'd like to get back to unscrewing your foul-up if that's okay."

I've worked with scientists, medical doctors, and lawyers, and they can all be complete bastards. There are ways to get under the skin of each and every one of them while doing your job. Just make sure they don't have sufficient juice to get you summarily dismissed.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for a number of years as a net/sys admin (several jobs, all 1000+ users, heterogenous networks, 1 admin) and a number of years as a scientist.

The GPP has it exactly right. Most admins are prima donnas with ego's out of all proportion to their abilities who are in denial about the fact that they are often not very smart (smart IT people tend to go into development) and in a low level service industry. I've met a few competent net/sys/db/web admin's. The majority however are incompetents who create vast amounts of unnecessary work for themselves, and waste the time of the people around them, in large part by failing to use all the forms of computer automation and security available. In particular, if you think it's significantly harder to admin 100 desktops instead of 10 desktops then you're not competent.

Your 'web site down' scenario is laughable; I can think of at least a dozen ways to insure the integrity of a main website while still allowing users to get things done immediately and without wasting time on useless paperwork, everything from having a hot clone to swap to if the main web site goes down to putting the user's part of the web site on a separate box to defining privileges so the user can't touch/harm the main part of the website.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[mrdoogee]

Just remember, use your crowbar on the Headcrabs, shooting them is just a waste of ammo.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

Admins cant really lock anything down

That's what hot clones/backups are for. Sure, it goes down, but with a competent admin it will be up again 5 minutes later.

Locking down things that people need to get their work done (not the things they don't need) is a strong sign that the admin is not competent. It's likely the admin doesn't have a good understanding of how to organize the security available and as a result locks down far too much, or occasionally, too little.

If physicists are breaking systems it's because those systems weren't organized to serve their needs in the first place. Yes, physicists, and chemists, often have ancient and messy programs that must be run. Doesn't mean it should have any impact on overall system reliability. I say this having been on both sides of the fence.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[TheLink]

Well if you ever open one of those infamous interdimensional rifts it'll take more than a few beers to cover that ;).

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Capt James McCarthy]

"and I wouldnt want to be my sys admin ;)"

I'm sure the feeling is mutual.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[oldhack]

So... physicists are to sysadmins what sysadmins are to "normal" people. Some like that?

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[PPH]

If it wasn't for the users, we'd have a really sweet system running here.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[edsousa]

I'm working at my university's IT department and we didn't told our scientists that we received a lot of new machines for our cluster, because the more CPUs available, more they need :P
And yes, Fortran experts means a lot of headaches.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[David Gerard]

And geologists are worse. Never sysadmin at an oil company.

(Mind you, they do spend money on decent kit.)

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[David Gerard]

Worst bit is they're generally really nice and sweet-natured mad scientists so it's not even deliberate. Like toddlers who know calculus.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Roger W Moore]

You should come and work at ATLAS then. We are generally friendly and outgoing and so are our sysadmins.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Roger W Moore]

The admins at scientific labs like CERN are basically doing a heroic job despite the best efforts of their users to be as awkward as possible.

I'd disagree with that. Many physicists are simply trying to run their code and are generally ignorant of the inner workings of their computers, mainly because they are not interested, not from lack of ability.

I've taken down the UK particle physics cluter farm (the tier 1 in grid speak)

Reminds me of the time as a grad student when I "took over" the old CSF cluster at RAL and blocked out all the LEP experiments for a weekend. They weren't too pleased about that...although I seem to remember that they were more interested in how I'd done it. I can hardly be blamed if their batch queue system had a priority flag for jobs which a user could set now could I? It was in the man page...

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[dkf]

In particular, if you think it's significantly harder to admin 100 desktops instead of 10 desktops then you're not competent.

The big problem with large-scale desktop admin is that vendors won't supply you matched hardware, even if you have a contract that says they have to. (Dell, I'm looking at you!) That makes constructing the shared desktop images much harder than it ought to be. (I believe we're in the ten to twenty thousand range for installations there, so don't claim we don't know about scaling up; that stuff works.) But it's not that awful otherwise as you can give everyone the same thing and put the user-level differences in network-space. Servers are more awkward because they have different life cycles and more demanding performance requirements.

Your 'web site down' scenario is laughable; I can think of at least a dozen ways to insure the integrity of a main website while still allowing users to get things done immediately and without wasting time on useless paperwork, everything from having a hot clone to swap to if the main web site goes down to putting the user's part of the web site on a separate box to defining privileges so the user can't touch/harm the main part of the website.

We're already running a replicated virtualized server farm to support the website. (Actually around 500 independent domains the last time I checked, but that was a long while ago now.) The key problems relate to people wanting different major versions of modules (well, PHP to be exact) in use on the same website. It doesn't help when you have critical public-facing webapps which need some weird old version of something. (Yes, that's amazingly stupid. No, that's not the admins' fault in any way. I don't feel like discussing institutional politics.)

The "separate box" idea is nice, except that getting academics to properly resource such a thing is like extracting blood from a stone, and the chances are if it's not part of the main system, then it won't be patched regularly and will get hacked in a few months, causing more trouble. (Of course, a good few people do have separate boxes and do very well, as they understand the need to patch and audit. Those folks aren't the problem. But that's really not for everyone; some people really need to let the admins handle these things for them for their own best interests.)

Don't get me wrong. We've got incompetents. Our ticketing and backup systems... I don't want to think about it. But web, email and networking all function right and that's what I need to actually work. Which brings me back to my point earlier: there are competent admins about who aren't prima donnas (even if they're not a majority). I'm sorry for you if you've been stuck with the other kinds.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[steveo777]

I take the specs from the customer to the programmers! I HAVE PEOPLE SKILLS!

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Ceriel Nosforit]

Apparently its something about a lost patrol.

They're not lost. They're just superheroes now and you don't recognize them due to their colorful skin-tight outfits.

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[David Gerard]

You poor, poor bastard!

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldnt want to be my sys admin

Trying to get the CMS software to run, I see your point. /your sysadmin

Re:Sys Admin at CERN

[gowdy]

Incidently offtopic, the LHC is down at the moment and has been all day. Apparently its something about a lost patrol.

As you know they came back with a captured beam. Shame we're out of phase...

Terrabytes

[pablomme]

a massive Linux-based storage system supplying many terrabytes of disk storage

Clearly the effect of being buried 100m underground.

Re:Terrabytes

[kiehlster]

Maybe we should call it the wine-cellar effect. At any rate, I find it surprising that they're only using one storage system, and only "many" terabytes after considering it creates 15PB per year, unless "terrabytes" are a newly named unit of measure.

Re:Terrabytes

[networkconsultant]

-ducks-And the trolls only come out at night-runs-

Re:Terrabytes

[Icarium]

Not that surprising, given that in the long run it's only temporary. Once that data has been distributed, had multiple redundant backups made and cataloged, it will be wiped.

It is very much a way station - just because data will initially get dumped there doesn't mean it's going to live there very long.

Im also sceptical and feel that the use of terabytes is largely to keep the article(s) understandable to non geeks, and that the actual storage capacity is probably in the PB range anyway.

Re:Terrabytes

[gowdy]

I work on CMS, one of the six experiments. We have about 1.6PB of disk in the CERN storage system and 4PB of tape. I don't know about the other experiments. We do keep a copy of the initial data at CERN as well as at least one other site, tapes and disks do break and we don't want to lose the data.

geek viagra

[einer]

10 Gigabit Wan

I'll be in my bunk

Re:geek viagra

[networkconsultant]

Now all you need is a brain jack and they could stream all of p0rn directly to your bunk.

Re:geek viagra

[Locklin]

Are we gunna explode? I don't want to explode.

Excellent rap!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

The video is too funny - and very well done. Send a link to your kids and they'll finally understand what CERN and LHC do. Maybe we should do more science education like this.

Re:Excellent rap!

[Anonymous Coward]

The video is too funny - and very well done. Send a link to your kids and they'll finally understand what CERN and LHC do. Maybe we should do more science education like this.

Actually that sounds like a good way to make sure your kids hate Physics, Scientists and Rap music all in one blow :)

Any one else nervous that people like this are the ones who make nukes?

Re:Excellent rap!

[gardyloo]

I would almost risk having them hate science, as long as they also can't stand rap music.

Re:Excellent rap!

[cool_arrow]

My kids were dancing around the room doing the "funky physicist".

Re:Excellent rap!

[cool_arrow]

No.

Re:Excellent rap!

[mapkinase]

"Maybe we should do more science education like this."

No, we should not.

Re:Excellent rap!

[Macgrrl]

Is that like the Funky Gibbon?

Re:Excellent rap!

[falconwolf]

The video is too funny - and very well done. Send a link to your kids and they'll finally understand what CERN and LHC do.

I got a kick out of it myself.

Maybe we should do more science education like this.

My first thought, well one of the first thoughts, was that music videos like the Large Hadron Rap could encourage youngsters to go into science. But the videos would have to come fast and furiously. Otherwise they would get bored.

Falcon

Re:Excellent rap!

[falconwolf]

I would almost risk having them hate science, as long as they also can't stand rap music.

Have videos set with country, rock, or other genres of music.

Falcon

What it means to IT.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

They've got a nice slant though on what this big bang experiment is going to mean for the IT Industry.

Here's the short, short version: NOTHING.
Yes, there are lots of computers in use, but is there anything particularly unusual going on here or an brand new way of organizing IT? No? OK, then.

Re:What it means to IT.

[David Gerard]

Er, yes there is - goddamn gigafirehoses of data coming out the damn thing and all needing to be saved for later scrutiny.

Re:What it means to IT.

[MyLongNickName]

But how exactly does this impact the IT industry? My company will need to upgrade its backup systems soon. This does not translate into new technology for IT as a whole. CERN = my company * 10^9, but are new technologies coming out of this?

Re:What it means to IT.

[arth1]

The physical properties they will prove, disprove or discover will undoubtedly find practical applications. How about being able to communicate at speeds that don't decrease rapidly with the density of the medium, like light through fiber does? Or perhaps being able to tap vacuum for power? Or the holy grail of being able to reliably create mass from energy? Or things we haven't even thought of?

Whatever they come up with, I'm sure that the repercussions for all industries, and perhaps especially the IT industry will be huge.

Re:What it means to IT.

[David Gerard]

It'll certainly result in new technologies for dealing with this stuff becoming cheaper. It's the people who have to do goddamn ridiculous things this year and have billions lying around to do so who push things forward for us cheapskates.

Re:What it means to IT.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the short, short version: NOTHING. Yes, there are lots of computers in use, but is there anything particularly unusual going on here or an brand new way of organizing IT? No? OK, then.

Well IT people like to consider themselves on the forefront of science, even though they're not.

Re:What it means to IT.

[MyLongNickName]

That is fine. But when I read an article about what CERN will do for IT, I expect there to be some specific improvements. Not simply "well, it has some really big challenges, so I suppose something will come as a result".

Re:What it means to IT.

[David Gerard]

Well, that's pretty much their answer when people ask what the heck's the practical use of spending billions to smash protons together ;-)

Re:What it means to IT.

[MyLongNickName]

Ya know what? I can accept that. We know that this is theoretical physics. Who would have guessed that understanding the atom would have resulted in the type of electronics breakthroughs that we take for granted today? I don't know what will come out of understanding particle physics, but I would bet a lot of money that we will see some serious breakthroughs in 30 or 40 years that will make it worthwhile.

Now, IT isn't theoretical. If there is an article written about how IT will change because of this, then I want to know how IT will change because of this. I don't think that is unreasonable.

Re:What it means to IT.

[David Gerard]

You'll destroy the world of IT journalism with an attitude like that!

cnet.com: "Nothing happened today."
zdnet.com: "Nope, nothing here either."
networkweek: "It's Patch Tuesday ... no, we don't care either."
theregister.co.uk: "Tits! Beer! Football!"

Re:What it means to IT.

[permaculture]

Just a reminder, the scientists at CERN needed a good way to share information, and the Web was the result.

http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/About/Web-en.html

Who knows what spin-offs might come from the LHC?

Re:What it means to IT.

[lgw]

Sadly, 30 years of string theory hasn't even yeilded any partical physics. Sometimes theoretical physics is a total waste. Still, the LHC is cool - *experimental* physics, unlike theoretical physics, is sure to teach us something. Heck, it might even teach us somethig about IT, though I share your skepticism.

nice summary

[Anonymous Coward]

"the amusing rap video by CERN's scientists that hase been wandering around Youtube."

I hase a seekrut!

Is there some kind of unwritten law that states: "the more advanced the subject, the more retarded the writing has to be?"

Re:nice summary

[whencanistop]

It is so that people with too puny a mind to understand the subject can comment on the spelling rather than the subject matter.

Re:nice summary

[Spatial]

What's this, an ad hominem collision? I didn't know it was a particle!

Weapons to maximum

[rktechhead]

It is certainly an exciting time to be alive, what we are witnessing here will probably be considered one of those points in our history in which we make a huge leap in our collective knowledge.

I can't wait for the day where a small portion of our population's work day will consist of sitting in a leather chair in a ship and saying "Weapons to maximum"

If CERN fails

[eebra82]

Look at it this way: if they fail to find the God particle, at least they can make a really affordable subway system.

Re:If CERN fails

[Anonymous Coward]

"if they fail to find the God particle, at least they can make a really affordable subway system."

It runs in a big circle, under pretty much open space... would that be the "subway to nowhere"? Will we be reading the news articles about how Palin voted for the "subway to nowhere" before she voted against it?

Re:If CERN fails

[suggsjc]

I for one would not want to ride on the "Large Subway Collider"!

Re:If CERN fails

[teh kurisu]

The Glasgow Subway runs in a big circle, so it's not without precedent.

It would be cool if they could re-use the electromagnets to drive the trains.

Re:If CERN fails

[X0563511]

Good way to bring US Election politics completely the fuck out to left field. Go away.

Re:If CERN fails

[moosesocks]

My favorite tidbit about the Glasgow Subway is that they apparently have to occasionally flip the trains around, because the wheels on the "inner" side of the train wear down much faster than the ones on the outside.

Re:If CERN fails

[hobbit]

Why that way round? I'd have thought that centrifugal force would cause the outer wheels to wear faster.

Re:If CERN fails

[mrdoogee]

And if you've ever been to Glasgow, you'll notice it also goes nowhere (that you'd want to be).

Re:If CERN fails

[VolciMaster]

... you haven't participated in hoagie food fights!?!

Re:If CERN fails

[Anonymous Coward]

You can ride the Large Hardon Subway instead.

Best source for evil scientist news

[Geoffrey.landis]

The Register's coverage of the LHC is a lot more, well, entertaining than the coverage by other newspapers. Same news, but a little more energy in the presentation...

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe

Boffinry bitchslap brouhaha: Higgs and Hawking head to head.

...and they also answer important questions, like So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum? Plus, the size of Wales in cubic furlongs

...anyway, getting back on topic, they also tell us, in Today is not Hadron Collider Day,
"Only a year or more from now will the colliding protons be disintegrated with sufficient violence to produce the various treats we have been promised. Strangely perhaps, by then it seems a racing cert that the broadcasters will all have gone home, and the scribblers will mostly have ceased to file copy. Once the insane laughs begin to truly ring out in the LHC's underground caverns, once the mad scientists wipe the foam from their lips, roll up their sleeves, lock and load their outrageous particle guns and really start to show what they can do, the chances are that nobody will be watching.
"But there will be at least one exception. The Reg hereby pledges to stay on the story, bringing you all the humonguous subterranean cavern magno-doughnut beam cannon news hot off the wires - perhaps with a garnish of hysterical rip-in-the-very-fabric-of-spacetime dimension portal angle here and there. As long as there's a universe to report from, we will continue to follow the Quest for the Big Answers (TM)"

Re:Best source for evil scientist news

[cyberwench]

I love The Register. My favorite part...

That would be bad: but even if the LHC guys manage to avoid it, there are other ways in which their meddling might destroy the world.

A particularly violent game of proton billiards, for instance, of the very sort the LHC's superpowered seven trillion electron-volt atomic cues are designed to play, might lead to all sorts of trouble. Quarks might get mixed up into "negatively-charged strangelets" which would turn everything else they touched into strangelets as well. The Earth, and then perhaps the entire universe, could be turned into a fearful strangelet soup; or perhaps custard.

A related worry is that overly vigorous particle-punishing tomfoolery at the LHC could produce "magnetic monopoles", which are dicey freaks of nature. Monopoles could trigger a runaway reaction not unlike the quark-strangelet scenario, in which everything gets changed into something else. This could lead to a turn-up for the books, in which the Moon remained made of moon but the Earth was abruptly converted into cheese.

Man, I wish I could write like that.

Re:Best source for evil scientist news

[PPH]

After reading the article about the Hawaiian botanist's suit to stop the LHC, I think I now know who inherited Don Ho's stash.

Re:Best source for evil scientist news

[dogdick]

I was listening to a radio show where they were interviewing one of the scientists from LHC and they asked about destroying the world. The host asked something to the effect of "what could go wrong that would end up destroying the world?" The scientist responded with, "nothing would go wrong. It's an experiment, that would just be the outcome."

Im curious what its like to have to walk around with balls that huge everyday.

Re:Best source for evil scientist news

[Zeinfeld]

What is unique about the LHC is not the energies of the collisions. It is the number and the ability to observe the results.

Much higher energy collisions are taking place in the upper atmosphere all the time. If they were going to create a black hole we would already be gonners.

This is all the fault of the CERN spinmeisters talking about recreating the Big Bang. But then again I guess you need spin to get the money to do that type of experiment.

Please please!

[Fallen Andy]

Don't call it the "god particle" (Peter Higgs is an atheist just like his hero Paul Dirac).

(Apparently it was originally "goddammned particle" but someone edited a manuscript...).

Andy

Re:Please please!

[hobbit]

Calling it the "god particle" makes a mockery of religion, and so is completely compatible with atheism.

Re:Please please!

[Jorophose]

And why not?

If this particle is so crucile, why not give it a name that makes it sound as important as it is? Doesn't it, on the flip side, give insight into the begginings of time, making it closer to the term "god" that you only seem to know.

LHC webcam

[Stroot]

LHC webcam: http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Ahem

[clang_jangle]

Here's the short, short version: NOTHING. Yes, there are lots of computers in use, but is there anything particularly unusual going on here or an brand new way of organizing IT? No? OK, then

From TFA:

Analysts have said financial firms will deal with gigabytes of data per second within the next five years. So the sorts of grid processing, networking and storage technologies that Cern is pioneering will soon become relevant to many technology users.

I really don't get the "I'm to cool to RTFA" thing myself, I find willful ignorance kinda undesirable.

Re:Ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

"Analysts have said financial firms will deal with gigabytes of data per second within the next five years. So the sorts of grid processing, networking and storage technologies that Cern is pioneering will soon become relevant to many technology users."

Umm... financial firms won't have any money left for the equipment and engineers in five years. :)

creators, the big flash, & what it means to yo

[Anonymous Coward]

there's no doubt that some intervention is in order.

'The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)

greed, fear & ego are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of yOUR dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & the notion of prosperity, not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one. see you on the other side of it. the lights are coming up all over now. conspiracy theorists are being vindicated. some might choose a tin umbrella to go with their hats. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be yOUR guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. there are still some choices. if they do not suit you, consider the likely results of continuing to follow the corepirate nazi hypenosys story LIEn, whereas anything of relevance is replaced almost instantly with pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking propaganda or 'celebrity' trivia 'foam'. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on yOUR brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.

http://news.google.com/?ncl=1216734813&hl=en&topic=n
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=c4b5414371631707&ei=5087%0A
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/world/29amnesty.html?hp
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/02/nasa.global.warming.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/05/severe.weather.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/02/honore.preparedness/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/opinion/01dowd.html?em&ex=1212638400&en=744b7cebc86723e5&ei=5087%0A
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/05/senate.iraq/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/washington/17contractor.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/world/middleeast/03kurdistan.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080708/cheney_climate.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080805/pl_politico/12308;_ylt=A0wNcxTPdJhILAYAVQms0NUE
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080903/ts_nm/environment_arctic_dc;_ylt=A0wNcwhhcb5It3EBoy2s0NUE

is it time to get real yet? A LOT of energy is being squandered in attempts to keep US in the dark. in the end (give or take a few 1000 years), the creators will prevail (world without end, etc...), as it has always been. the process of gaining yOUR release from the current hostage situation may not be what you might think it is. butt of course, most of US don't know, or care what a precarious/fatal situation we're in. for example; the insidious attempts by the felonious corepirate nazi execrable to block the suns' light, interfering with a requirement (sunlight) for us to stay healthy/alive. it's likely not good for yOUR health/memories 'else they'd be bragging about it? we're intending for the whoreabully deceptive (they'll do ANYTHING for a bit more monIE/power) felons to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather', as well as a # of other things/events.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=weather+manipulation&btnG=Search
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying

dictator style micro management has never w

Obama is self-destructing before our very eyes...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess he isn't the second-coming of Jesus after all. Chicago mayor Richard Daley's little puppet is going to bring change? The guy who sat in Jeremiah Wright's pew for 20 yrs listening to Black Revenge Theology is going to bring healing? The guy who knocked on William Ayers the self-admitted terrorist's door to seek his permission to run for office in Chicago is going to bring peace? Obama - the guy who's been campaigning nonstop for President since the day he set foot in the U.S. Senate. I'll bet you Kum Ba Yah motherfuckers are having some serious buyer's remorse right now and were wishing that Hillary was on the ticket instead of Joe Biden, the guy who called Obama clean and well-spoken for a negro as if he were surprised by that.

You'd think the Scientific angle...

[S7urm]

would be more newsworthy, Especially considering that this experiment will either A. Destroy the world, B. prove the Higgs Boson and other crazy particulate theory, C. prove(disprove) the existence of....GOD D. all of the above

Who cares about the IT angle when I could walk away from this experiment saying "See, I TOLD YOU, God doesn't exist, the Higgs Boson is your new God" ..........and then create a new religion and be rich, RICH I TELLS YA!

Re:You'd think the Scientific angle...

[Falstius]

The scientific advances from the LHC won't be coming for another few years. The IT impacts are happening now. I'm sure we'll get a new news blitz when the LHC starts to actually collide particles at high energies (when it breaks Fermi Labs records in a year or so) and then yet another when the first import preliminary results come in (preliminary because it will take another year after that to accumulate the statistics for definite results).

The LHC has been in construction for what, 15 years now? It is about time they get to have a party. Actually, we had parties for pretty much every tiny milestone, champagne is cheap there. But this is a bit bigger.

Re:You'd think the Scientific angle...

[Anonymous Coward]

The IT-Impacts defenitely are there already:
2008 is the year of Linux on the LHC, baby!

The Black Hole and Big Bang

[ilovesymbian]

The other day, someone was watching a movie on his iPod Touch and walking on the road. He didn't see the black hole in front of him, and fell down. He got a glimpse of what the Big Bang was about!

Bigger Computing Grid At SETI

[s31523]

While I find the grid at Cern impressive with their claim that "Cern will be using one of the biggest computer grids this summer to pool the processing power of about 100,000 CPUs worldwide", I find the SETI project even more impressive, which according to Berkley boasts "Currently the largest distributed computing effort with over 3 million users".

Granted, Cern claims that it processing its information at 1Gbps, I wonder how that stacks up against SETI

Re:Bigger Computing Grid At SETI

[jd]

CERN (and their collaborators) use fully Open Source grid software. I've added a few of the more interesting projects to Freshmeat. Before we get all cynical, let's exploit the hell out of what they've made available.

Re:Bigger Computing Grid At SETI

[notrandomly]

How about LHC@home? :)

A suggestion ...

[LaughingCoder]

I think it might be a good idea to limit the size of AC posts, which would hopefully prevent these types of screeds from infecting every discussion.

Re:A suggestion ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A good idea would be to tell YOU how very ridiculously & easily trackable you are here on slashdot, because you are a "registered user": Ever considered that 'take' on it, you name tossing wannabe "elitist" (your kind makes myself & others laugh hugely, because you apparently don't realize YOU made YOURSELF, another easily tracked /. sheep in the herd of registered users here)? You're obviously not intelligent enough to even realize that you made yourself an easily tracked target here if need be on the part of someone that may take offense to your name tossing & use of profanities + snide little elitist comments, etc.

Re:A suggestion ...

[Anonymous Coward]

LaughingCoder:
That's the whole point of the moderation system. If someone doesn't like registering but has some long, but well written, insight on a subject they can post it, and it may get moderated up. Crap like what you responded to gets moderated down, usually pretty quickly.

Re:A suggestion ...

[Anonymous Coward]

A good idea would be to tell YOU how very ridiculously & easily trackable you are here on slashdot, because you are a "registered user": Ever considered that 'take' on it, you name tossing wannabe "elitist" (your kind makes myself & others laugh hugely, because you apparently don't realize YOU made YOURSELF, another easily tracked /. sheep in the herd of registered users here)? You're obviously not intelligent enough to even realize that you made yourself an easily tracked target here if need be on the part of someone that may take offense to your name tossing & use of profanities + snide little elitist comments, etc.

So AC's are more difficult to track than registered users? They get 'hidden ip-addresses' or something? Tosser. Posting AC, cause of karma.

Impact...

[PhasmatisApparatus]

Please don't mention LHC and "Impact" in the same sentence. It's bad enough that I have to worry about invisible black holes (worse than cancer! And twice as hard to cure!), but now I have to worry about giant lifeforms crashing into Antarctica.

What have they ever done

[houghi]

What has CERN ever done for the IT industry?

Re:What have they ever done

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, HTTP and HTML aren't huge IT advances.

Comments from BBC Readers... enjoy!

[AP31R0N]

no doubt this has been a very worthwhile experiment, pushing forward the boundaries of science, enhancing our understanding of how the cosmos was created... but surely these massive brains could have been put to better use figuring out how we can now avoid destroying it all? seems like a teensy waste of money if you ask me... just a good job they didn't create a great big black hole and obliterate us after all! "OOOOPS! sorry about that..."

Fairly important, I'd say. As it appears to have set off earthquakes in Japan and Indonesia later the same day. Coincidence or something far sinister ? Conclusion: "don't do it again ?"

"I think that scientist must do their experiment"..... but they shouldn't be do it against nature.Let these things remains in hands of God.....Ok

What a colossal waste of money - who cares how the universe started - if we had applied the cash used to construct this geek's dream gadget to something like AIDS research or some of the huge environmental problems threatening to detroy our planet it would have been far better spent.

isnt the big bang still a theory?
the way these scientists are describing the LHC you'd think it was a proven scientific fact!
i'm sure it will be excellent value for money - a handful of scientists get paid hansomely for doing a hobby based on supposition.
forget poverty, starvation and disease - this purposeless experiment is far more important(!)

I have always believed that it is "gravity" that makes mass and not the reverse. I also believe that the universe is like a ballon, and each piece of matter, regardless of size, leaves a foot print that extends throughout the universe. The foot print is made of "waves" that we cannot see or measure. If the LHC works, it will radically change our way of life, making space travel and even the tele-transporation of matter possible. Dease and illness could become a state of the past.

All good to test things. But not at the financial cost they spend on somthing 90% of the population of the world do not under stand. I.
Science can't proof the the beginning as it has one flaw in the big bang theory. "In the beginning there was nothing" Nothing can't creat any thing. The Bible say "that the earth was here and it describe how the eath looked before God spoke a few word to create what we see now. God rules! Science?

They have spent £5 bn pounds on the experiment just to know the past. They should have thought about the future instead and sent the same amount to the areas where this money was much needed. People in Africa and Asia are dying of hunger, cold, and diseases. They need the money and our support rather than few experiments about the planet's past. Some of them don't even know that these experiments are happening.

I cant believe they would put our lives at danger!
They could have had a world wide vote to see what everyone thought just like they did for england with terminal 5.They put billions of lives at risk more lives then how much money they spent one the experiment in the first place ? Why the world is gonna stop anyway so whats the point on spending the money when other people need that money to survive.What went through their heads i do not know but next time is there is one STOP & THINK AGAIN!

It's very interesting, but it's about as important as the colour of my underpants. £5billion could be spent a lot more wisely.

I think the experiment is total waste of time and money. I don't care if the earth is gonna blow up or not, but, you know, just think about the starving people in Africa. We can help them a lot by not to spending on that experiment. Advancement in science is good. But the tiny particle cannot provide them a life. That's what I thought when I heard that the supermassive amount of money were spent to them.

When all the hype has died down and when the project leaders and contractors are all happily retired on the fees they have raked in, I suspect this expensive machine will be regarded as the European Millenium Dome.

It means nothing for IT

[pdq332]

It means absolutely nothing for the wider IT industry. LHC Computing is engineered to distribute very large volumes of data (in the Petabytes/year range) around the world to scientists in an open and agreed upon format. It is paid for out of the science budgets of participating governments. The complementary challenges in the IT industry revolve around how to fairly distribute commercially available bandwidth and how to secure data and maintain privacy. In terms of open structure and intended use, LHC computing resembles the friendly collegial atmosphere of the early ARPANET, which is widely credited creating many of the bandwith and security problems IT is currently struggling with today.

am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

...at the amount of tax money that's been collected at gunpoint (all taxes are collected at gunpoint) to fund this project? For those outside the European Union, many member states give a yearly funding to CERN.

I hate the EU, and when I see all those scientists dancing around like asses because of money that someone has forced me to pay them, I lose the motivation to work.

"Science" benefits mankind in the same way guns benefit mankind - if they're used in the right way. You can't just throw billions of euros at some problem and consider it worthy just because it employs the scientific method. Even if you're of meek build and wearing a lab coat, you can still be a thug and a thief who expects everyone else to fund your pet project.

This is why I am a mathematician and not a scientist. So much science is high priced sensationalist bullcrap, whereas advanced mathematics is just as cheap to do as basic mathematics. I'm never going to become a celebrity with global headlines just because I could afford to jack about with a huge toy but I am trying to help as many people as I can with numeracy to help them get further.

And before I hear a "oh oh oh but the web was invented at CERN", what is your point? (1) The invention had nothing to do with CERN itself; (2) the majority of ingredients already existed in not quite the same form, and it's rather irritating that TBL gets so much credit for a creation that involved a whole host more people.

EOR.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[UncleTogie]

This is why I am a mathematician and not a scientist. So much science is high priced sensationalist bullcrap....

Silly question: If you're NOT a scientist, how can you tell it's high-priced sensationalist bullcrap, especially the more esoteric work?

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is a silly question. Except for the extreme amount of indirection taking place, it's akin to a mugger holding a gun to your head and shouting, "give me $200, it's essential!" When you deny the request they respond that, since you're not an [insert random title here], you wouldn't understand - then take it anyway.

Now for a more detailed response:

1. I think we're all agreed that it's high priced, yes?

2. Sensationalism in the everyday sense - remembering that my OP was motivated by a bloody rap video - comes from the fact that they built the biggest, most expensive structure evar, made no big deal about it until soon before launch, and are now milking the press time. In the philosophical sense, the whole thing is sensationalist by putting so much emphasis on experiencing xome aspect of the sub-microscopic world to derive knowledge about it.

3. I can't say whether "more esoteric work" is bullcrap, and I'm not saying it's all bad science either - but see point (2) above. I'm not enough of an egotist to assume that undergraduate physics gives me enough to judge worth - indeed, many scientists don't even realise the full value of their work in their own lifetimes.

What I am saying is that the framework for justifying funding of much so-called academic work is fucked. Hell, go back to ancient Greece and you have Eratosthenes writing bullshit to Ptolemy on some machine for calculating proportionals (and yes, for anyone interested in the history of science, I am aware of the uncertainty over the letter's origins), pretending that it has way more practical value than it really does. It's regular human behaviour, it's just rare to see it on this horrendous scale.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[hobbit]

Yes, it is a silly question. Except for the extreme amount of indirection taking place, it's akin to a mugger holding a gun to your head and shouting, "give me $200, it's essential!" When you deny the request they respond that, since you're not an [insert random title here], you wouldn't understand - then take it anyway.

If you don't like taxes, move to a country where there aren't any.

1. I think we're all agreed that it's high priced, yes?

Absolutely not. Where do you get your metric from?

2. Sensationalism in the everyday sense - remembering that my OP was motivated by a bloody rap video

No, your OP provided a link to a rap video. It's an amusing and educational video. No-one is suggesting that video is worth billions of dollars.

- comes from the fact that they built the biggest, most expensive structure evar, made no big deal about it until soon before launch, and are now milking the press time.

What a load of crap. The papers picked up a story about the end of the world, which is what sells newspapers, and suddenly the LHC is in the news. The reason it's caught the imagination is nothing to do with CERN's publicity or lack thereof.

In the philosophical sense, the whole thing is sensationalist by putting so much emphasis on experiencing xome aspect of the sub-microscopic world to derive knowledge about it.

You're a mathematician -- I wouldn't expect you to understand.

3. I can't say whether "more esoteric work" is bullcrap, and I'm not saying it's all bad science either - but see point (2) above. I'm not enough of an egotist to assume that undergraduate physics gives me enough to judge worth - indeed, many scientists don't even realise the full value of their work in their own lifetimes.

What I am saying is that the framework for justifying funding of much so-called academic work is fucked.

The reason you can't, as a mathematician, command budgets like these is that you don't need to. It's not a value judgment -- get over it.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[meringuoid]

For those outside the European Union, many member states give a yearly funding to CERN. I hate the EU, and when I see all those scientists dancing around like asses because of money that someone has forced me to pay them, I lose the motivation to work.

CERN has nothing to do with the EU, except insofar as it is partially in it, and shares some of the same member states.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like taxes, move to a country where there aren't any.

Let's Godwin that argument, shall we? "Hey, Jew, if you don't like being worked to death, escape from the camp and flee to Allied territory." Go on, knee-jerk dismiss me! Because the argument, "If you have nowhere to run, then the status quo must be OK," is a sound argument, right?

I think we're all agreed that it's high priced, yes?Absolutely not. Where do you get your metric from?

You actually want me to answer why I think £34 million/year (from the UK, in which I pay taxes, to the LHC alone) is a lot of money? Well, since it will be more than the income tax bill for my entire lifetime, that means that I could have paid no income tax whatsoever all my life if the LHC hadn't been built. And ditto for several dozen other above-average wage earners. Each year. We could all then choose to invest that money in projects we consider of greater value than the LHC.

But let me guess - you're using a metric which considers proportion of total government spending, conveniently forgetting that "government spending" is "collection of individuals' income" spending?

It's an amusing and educational video. No-one is suggesting that video is worth billions of dollars.

In the UK quite a few higher education institutions are throttling their physics departments due to lack of undergraduate intake. If I was a budding scientist and I saw something like this video from what I would have heard as the scientists with the best access to resources in all of Europe then I would certainly reconsider my view of what science has become.

There was a time when science was about, well, doing science. You were allowed to be quirky, absent-minded, a loner, as long as you published good science. Your chief tools were imagination and mathematics. Today, science's chief weapons are:

(1) the good communicator - because there's so much noise between scientist and scientist, and between scientists and the public. The real science geek is sidelined;

(2) the grant, because science has gone from being chiefly analytical to chiefly numerical. Got a problem? Buy a cluster and simulate it. Need to test a theory? Collect petabytes of data about it.

The papers picked up a story about the end of the world, which is what sells newspapers, and suddenly the LHC is in the news.

Feel an air of superiority much? The papers picked up a story about a potentially dangerous experiment which, thanks to the elite nature of science, no-one outside the scientific world understands much about. Ignorance breeds fear, yes, but you seem to be blaming *the people who funded the experiment* rather than *the people doing it*, when the latter have a duty to inform the former.

You're a mathematician -- I wouldn't expect you to understand.

Hm, confirms my previous paragraph then.

The reason you can't, as a mathematician, command budgets like these is that you don't need to.

Given £36 million/year I could do great things for mathematics education in the UK, so I "need" £36 million/year.

I assume that when I take, say, a £1 contribution from your wallet you'll not try to stop me. It's only £1, not much by any metric, right :-).

Re:am i the only one angry...

[edsousa]

So much science is high priced sensationalist bullcrap, whereas advanced mathematics is just as cheap to do as basic mathematics.

Do you want to pay the electricity bill for the share of that the mathematicians use on our cluster? You don't.
And lets not talk about the hardware costs, the wage for sysadmins, compensation when they take the cluster down, f** Matlab licensing fees (Octave anyone?)...

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mathematics, without science, is merely art and therefore even more useless by you criteria...

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

CERN has nothing to do with the EU, except insofar as it is partially in it...

Bollocks.

(1) Origins: CERN, Euratom, the EEC, etc. were all Western European efforts in the early to mid '50s by a substantially overlapping list of countries as a post-war reconciliation dream and nuclear/military barrier against the East.

(Yes, I know the USSR did a great job getting Yugoslavia signed up in CERN, but it also left in 1961 as the pre-detente decade of cock-waggling between East and West escalated.)

(2) The EU directly funds CERN. As a scientist I'm sure your research skills are up to finding out what they've donated over the years.

(3) CERN today is precisely the 18 EU member states plus EEA member Norway plus money-from-everyone-treaties-from-no-one Switzerland.

CERN is a project of the EU member states hosted by Switzerland.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

...at the amount of tax money that's been collected at gunpoint (all taxes are collected at gunpoint) to fund this project? For those outside the European Union, many member states give a yearly funding to CERN.

I hate the EU, and when I see all those scientists dancing around like asses because of money that someone has forced me to pay them, I lose the motivation to work.

Well, if you hate the EU, you should do that independent of CERN. CERN has nothing to do with the EU, is not funded by the EU, is not even head quartered in one of their member states, and also exists longer than the EU. And also states outside of the EU are members of CERN or associated with it, and fund the project. The US contributed more than half a Billion Dollars to the LHC.

From one of your other posts:

2. Sensationalism in the everyday sense - remembering that my OP was motivated by a bloody rap video - comes from the fact that they built the biggest, most expensive structure evar, made no big deal about it until soon before launch, and are now milking the press time.

Made no big deal about it? Maybe mainstream media only picked up on it recently because of this "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit. But you can hardly blame CERN for that. This is the biggest project in (particle) physics since years (not to say ever), and CERN was happy to tell anybody about it who wanted to listen. And if you would have read anything in media which is directed to that sort of thing, you would have had plenty to read about this for the last decade or so.

You don't want you tax money to be spend on that? Fine, consider it not spent on that but for other things you consider important. I'm sure there are people who consider this kind of science to be important and think it's OK that a certain (in the end very small) fraction of tax money is spend on that. Probably other people don't like money to spend on things you consider important. That's life.

And you get worked up because some people who are involved in that are still able to have fun and make a video of it (which you don't like), in their spare time, which costed CERN zero?

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a big overlap, yes. And I agree that CERN is a project dominated by EU member states (and thus also an institution which has the support of the EU). Nevertheless, it's not an EU organisation. Most CERN member states are nowadays also in the EU. Although half of the founding members became EU/EC members much later than joining CERN (eg. the UK, Greece, Sweden) or did not yet join (Switzerland, Norway) or never joined Yugoslavia. Also concerning the other EU/CERN members you will surely see that they became member in one organisation rather independent from the membership in the other.

It's a joint (mostly) European science effort. If you don't agree with such projects, fine. But don't blame the EU for that.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[JambisJubilee]

I think Hawking put it best. Speaking of the LHC and the space program:

Together they cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP. If the human race can not afford this, then it doesn't deserve the epithet 'human'.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck? You appear to be building the strawman that I said an endeavour was useless unless there's some sort of immediate practical benefit.

What I was trying to get across, and this list is brief and not exhaustive, is that:

(1) The absolute cost of any funding is highly relevant. To make relative comparisons with the cost of other state-funded projects is meaningless, just as I can't take $1 from your wallet simply because it's only a tiny fraction of your income. (Even) pure art can justify its funding, but that doesn't mean it can justify $100E6s of funding;

(2) Scientists should stop trying to be trendy, instead ecouraging those who are prepared to put in hard work and are keen to learn about the scientific method;

(3) Scientists do not exist to serve their own whims. "You wouldn't understand", "how do you know if you're not a scientist?" are not justifications for anything you do on my dime/shilling. If you want a loud voice of support, see (2);

(4) Science (and mathematics, to answer another respondent) has often become too much about experimentation, number crunching and simulation.

I was chatting to a medical doctor a few weeks ago who had moved onto research (at the top learning hospital in his field in the country). He had an impossibly encyclopedic knowledge of the latest studies in his field but little knowledge and almost no understanding of statistical methods. He assumed that I'd be able to answer his questions, but everything I said was accompanied with "consult your stats reviewer". In the end he seemed to have decided (quite rightly) that his study would not actually conclude anything, though it would provide good hints for further avenues.

Klein, in his Elementary Mathematics sieres, responding to Cayley's remark that he'd give one of 14(?) lectures on mathematics entirely on the determinant, commented that there was a danger that maths would - to paraphrase - become too much about mindless manipulation without really understanding what's going on. I don't for a minute think that LHC scientists don't know what they're doing, but there is a far greater emphasis on "if you're not sure, throw a computer at it", from middle-school calculators to post-doctorate.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you hate the EU, you should do that independent of CERN. CERN has nothing to do with the EU...

Already addressed this in a previous post. The geopolitics of the 1950s that created the EU (EEC) created CERN; the funding for CERN mostly comes from EU member states or the EU itself (same thing); the membership comprises almost exclusively EU states.

Made no big deal about it? Maybe mainstream media only picked up on it recently because of this "LHC will destroy the world" bullshit.

You're missing the point entirely. If the population at large is moved by such sensationalism then CERN should not have received funding in the first place. A democracy should involve greater understanding and consensus among all its citizens. That doesn't mean "no child left behind", but it doesn't mean "you wouldn't understand, layman" either. See ancient Greek democracy. Does this make sense to you?

You don't want you tax money to be spend on that? Fine, consider it not spent on that... Probably other people don't like money to spend on things you consider important. That's life.

If the levels of abstraction between me and my decision-making representatives were reduced an order of magnitude then your argument would be fine. As it is, why don't you just Paypal me $10 and maybe I'll use some of that money for something you support, maybe I shan't.

And you get worked up because some people who are involved in that are still able to have fun

(1) It bothers me to see people who have taken a huge chunk of my money without anything near my consent having fun in the environment I've paid for, yes;

(2) Such presentations of science are imho harmful when it comes to attracting people who are interested in science. I'd have been quickly put off mathematics if in my final year of high school (6th form) I'd got given the impression it was the very "cool" I'd been spending all my teenage years trying to get away from. I was already put off engineering partly by a drive at the time to make engineering more appealing to women; "fuck that!" I thought - make engineering appealing to people with an aptitude and interest in engineering, regardless of gender, not people who happen to have tits! See a post I made above.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, ok, I'll use that style of argument...

"Feeding the malnourished world would cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP. If the human race prefers to go into space while leaving others to starve, then it doesn't deserve the epithet 'human'."

We're both engaging in the No True Scotsman fallacy.

I give up on this thread. I welcome differing opinions but no-one's really addressing my points - instead I'm seeing a tendency to think in binary. Just because I don't agree with the direction science often takes, it doesn't mean I'm anti-science; just because CERN isn't an official EU-sanctioned project, it doesn't mean it isn't in practical terms an EU(+CH) project.

The requirement to give the fruits of your labour to a state which passes on those riches to the mentally/physically fittest then tells you that it's for the good of *some higher cause* but that you wouldn't understand is the underlying premise of fascism. Maybe you agree with the "higher cause" today and maybe it benefits you, but when the same method is used to lead you into an unpopular war or an economic crisis, do you still lie back and take it? First they came, etc.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Roger W Moore]

And before I hear a "oh oh oh but the web was invented at CERN", what is your point? (1) The invention had nothing to do with CERN itself; (2) the majority of ingredients already existed in not quite the same form

The invention had everything to do with CERN. Nowhere else had a group of people scattered halfway around the world with a need for extremely detailed and precise communications and a small enough travel budget that they could not always just fly out and meet whenever they wanted. Of course now there are lots of such groups now but that is because of the web.

This is why I am a mathematician and not a scientist.

I would certainly agree with the last half of your statement. However mathematics is one of the sciences.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[Anonymous Coward]

I respectfully disagree. Science = logic + data. Mathematics = logic.

Re:am i the only one angry...

[hobbit]

If you don't like taxes, move to a country where there aren't any.

Let's Godwin that argument, shall we? "Hey, Jew, if you don't like being worked to death, escape from the camp and flee to Allied territory." Go on, knee-jerk dismiss me!

I don't have to: I can dismiss you with a perfectly cogent argument.

There *are* countries in which you don't have to pay taxes. Or at least, they're not called taxes. I don't think you'd like the way things are done there, though. This is not at all the same as escaping from a prison camp; you are free to renounce your UK citizenship at any time and make your way there. But then, you knew that, didn't you?

You actually want me to answer why I think £34 million/year (from the UK, in which I pay taxes, to the LHC alone) is a lot of money? Well, since it will be more than the income tax bill for my entire lifetime, that means that I could have paid no income tax whatsoever all my life if the LHC hadn't been built. And ditto for several dozen other above-average wage earners. Each year. We could all then choose to invest that money in projects we consider of greater value than the LHC.

But let me guess - you're using a metric which considers proportion of total government spending, conveniently forgetting that "government spending" is "collection of individuals' income" spending?

I'm using the same metric as you: "me and my mates think this is where the money is well spent". The difference is, I don't claim everyone agrees with me!

You were allowed to be quirky, absent-minded, a loner, as long as you published good science.

Just not a sense of humour, eh? Luckily, not everyone agrees with you. Of course, if you have supporting evidence that the decrease in Physics intake is that everyone is appalled that Physicians are also having fun as well as doing incredible work, then I'd love to see it.

Your chief tools were imagination and mathematics. Today, science's chief weapons are:

(1) the good communicator - because there's so much noise between scientist and scientist, and between scientists and the public. The real science geek is sidelined

Those with no social skills have always been sidelined. Nothing new here.

(2) the grant, because science has gone from being chiefly analytical to chiefly numerical. Got a problem? Buy a cluster and simulate it. Need to test a theory? Collect petabytes of data about it.

Whereas to test your pet theory about molecular physics, all you need is a paper and pencil and your "imagination". No, science is, and always has been, empirical. Again, you're thinking about maths; you don't seem to be able to get past that.

Feel an air of superiority much? The papers picked up a story about a potentially dangerous experiment which, thanks to the elite nature of science, no-one outside the scientific world understands much about.

Potentially dangerous my arse. The papers would have you believe that talking to your neighbour is dangerous.

Ignorance breeds fear, yes, but you seem to be blaming *the people who funded the experiment* rather than *the people doing it*, when the latter have a duty to inform the former.

I am doing nothing of the sort. Please explain why you claim this.

You're a mathematician -- I wouldn't expect you to understand.

Hm, confirms my previous paragraph then.

No, you just don't seem to understand that empirical evaluation requires money.

The reason you can't, as a mathematician, command budgets like these is that you don't need to.

Given £36 million/year I could do great things for mathematics education in the UK, so I "need" £36 million/year.

Here is a good evil scientist

[Anonymous Coward]

Dr. Horrible

Its an entertaining 45 minutes. It starts out kind of weak though.

Hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

So they want to recreate "The Big Bang".

I have no doubts that they will learn something from this study (they'd better considering the price of this thing!)

BUT it seems foolish to promote this study around the concept of the Big Bang when that is a HIGHLY contested theory that is statistically and conceptually almost impossible to have occurred and resulted in our current society at total random chance.

Why don't they instead promote the study around many of the other important things they have the potential to discover?

And their video is LAME. I prefer to stereotype the scientists on this project as ultra serious super-intelligent researchers, not a bunch of Youtube dorks, thank you very much.

Re:Hmmmm

[ciderVisor]

BUT it seems foolish to promote this study around the concept of the Big Bang when that is a HIGHLY contested theory

It gains more support through gathered evidence with each passing year. Who's going to supply a better theoretical framework which is supported by the same evidence ?

Re:Hmmmm

[hobbit]

it seems foolish to promote this study around the concept of the Big Bang when that is a HIGHLY contested theory

Highly contested by creationists, but not by people with a brain cell between them.

I prefer to stereotype the scientists on this project as ultra serious super-intelligent researchers

They are not only considerably more intelligent than you, they also have a better sense of humour than you do. And they are probably more dorky too.

Re:Hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

For one, you don't understand what they are talking about when they mention "recreating the Big Bang."

For another, the Big Bang theory is one of the most well-supported theories in astronomy.

Not only that, but you deny these people a sense of humor? Take a flying fuck, why don't you.

Since when did CERN only use a database?

[VisionMaster.NL]

How interesting... Just a 10Gbit/s WAN? How about, 11x that to each (combined) Tier-1 center via an optical private network to get the load of the data onto the Grid. How about the solutions created to get so much data spread out, indexed, replicated, and distributed. Perhaps that ain't that interesting. Perhaps the total capacity of the Grid being about 30 PB ain't that impressive. Perhaps the concept of more then 200 clusters big and small across different administrative domains at your finger tips might be not that challenging as it may seem. Ow well, let's focus on the database. Since that holds the least amount of actual data. Being it still is the biggest Oracle instance according to Oracle.

Huh?

[PPH]

| sed -e 's/data/p0rn/' -e 's/scientists/Slashdotters/'

Fixed it for you. Now it makes more sense.

Re:Huh?

[pdq332]

Yeah, yeah, ha ha. p0rn drives the bandwidth on the internet. Thank goodness for LHC computing: because it is sure to have an impact on bandwidth over and above all those bill-paying consumers downloading p0rn, movies, games and music every night. Make sure you write to your senator and congressperson extolling its virtues, that's what LHC computing people want. LHC computing: the Tang of IT, the Teflon of Particle Physics.

Sorry to unload on you, but I've had it with Slashdot.

"Large Hardon Collider" Score 5: funny.
"It'll certainly result in new technologies for dealing with this stuff becoming cheaper.": Score 4: Insightful.
"It adds nothing to IT above what was demonstrably already there": Score 1: Ignored.

Gee willikers, maybe Vint Cerf could invent another useful protocol to route commercial data on the LHC networks when the beam is down. A protocol in addition to his very useful interplanetary communication protocol and his very useful communications protocol for robots. And maybe those very bright young men and women can find a way for me to help them analyze LHC data in my screen saver while I'm going to the potty. And it's going to cure cancer too? Oh please, raise my taxes now!

Oh, and goodbye! You fellas take care now. Don't eat too much bulls**t, it could give you bad breath.

There was never any big bang

[CodeArt]

There was never any big bang and there is no such thing as dark matter. All this is to support "big-bang gang". Univers is eternal, finite and unbounded.

Can we

[SlashDev]

use the tunnel for rollerblading once they've completed the experiment?

Many offshoot of this project.

[Neanderthal Ninny]

Like the NASA man on the moon project of the 1960, this project will have many good offshoots of their research that have and will enhance our lives for many years to come.
I correspond to several people doing research at CERN and I see that many good ideas that will come out for IT and computer science.

CERN pioneered grid computing ? WTF ?

[whackeroony]

LHC was a motivation for Grids in the same way that CERN's problem of sharing files was a motivation for Sir TBL to create the Web. But, being a motivation does not mean you invented or "pioneered" the freaking stuff. Grids were around in many forms waaaay before CERN decided to go for it.

If anything CERN has achieved in Grids, it is to stunt its growth. It sucked a huge amount of funding from EU for the LCG (LHC Computing Grid) is huge. The LCG is a grid designed by and for control freaks. Many sensible design features (distributed control, proper resource allocation and scheduling, transaction safety, fairness among users) for distributed systems were left out of the LCG. Why? Because it was primarily designed by fucking physicists with a lot of money and who thought they knew waaaay more than computer scientists.

It's no wonder that the industry lost its patience with the grid community and went on to clouds. That's what grids could've been.

Hey CERN, here's a message. Why don't you limit yourselves to claiming credit for physics stuff while computer scientists take distributed systems forward. Fucking morons taking credit for inventing the Web and pioneering Grids. Bah!

Storage Tank

[Midnight Warrior]

If you're looking for more conversation about Storage Tank and how it compares to Quantum's StorNext product (another clustered filesystem), follow my shameless plug to my blog entry about it. Go there. Obligatory Disclaimer: I wrote the blog entry, but don't work for Quantum, IBM, or any of their resellers or consultants.