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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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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
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...
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
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.
I think you now start to see the extent of the problem. Seriously the sys admins are the outgoing ones at my work :)
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.
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.
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!
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
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.