Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
(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
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
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 for one would not want to ride on the "Large Subway Collider"!
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
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.
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!