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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."
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.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
What a sweet posting that would be. "OK people, we need another Terawatt of power, let's kick in the batteries!"
http://www.gibby.net.au
a massive Linux-based storage system supplying many terrabytes of disk storage
Clearly the effect of being buried 100m underground.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
10 Gigabit Wan
I'll be in my bunk
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.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Look at it this way: if they fail to find the God particle, at least they can make a really affordable subway system.
Full Tilt
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)"
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Er, yes there is - goddamn gigafirehoses of data coming out the damn thing and all needing to be saved for later scrutiny.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
(Apparently it was originally "goddammned particle" but someone edited a manuscript...).
Andy
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?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
LHC webcam: http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html
From TFA:
I really don't get the "I'm to cool to RTFA" thing myself, I find willful ignorance kinda undesirable.
Caveat Utilitor
It is so that people with too puny a mind to understand the subject can comment on the spelling rather than the subject matter.
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!
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
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.
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!
slashdot rocks
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.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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
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 has CERN ever done for the IT industry?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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".
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Well, that's pretty much their answer when people ask what the heck's the practical use of spending billions to smash protons together ;-)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
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.
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?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
You'll destroy the world of IT journalism with an attitude like that!
cnet.com: "Nothing happened today." ... no, we don't care either."
zdnet.com: "Nope, nothing here either."
networkweek: "It's Patch Tuesday
theregister.co.uk: "Tits! Beer! Football!"
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
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.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
CERN has nothing to do with the EU, except insofar as it is partially in it, and shares some of the same member states.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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?
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
| sed -e 's/data/p0rn/' -e 's/scientists/Slashdotters/'
Fixed it for you. Now it makes more sense.
Have gnu, will travel.
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?)...
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.
use the tunnel for rollerblading once they've completed the experiment?
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What's this, an ad hominem collision? I didn't know it was a particle!
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'.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato