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CERN's Particle Smashers List Their Toughest Tech Challenges

Posted by samzenpus on from the this-is-hard dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at CERN have detailed some of the big technology problems they need to solve to help the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) solve some of the fundamental questions about the nature of the universe. 'You make it, we break it' is the CERN openlab motto which looks at emerging tech: data acquisition, computing platforms, data storage architectures, compute management and provisioning and more are on the to do list."

8 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. joke by gurps_npc · · Score: 2

    Left out terrorists sneaking in to steal their anti-matter and threaten the vatican.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
  2. The actual document by kyrsjo · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... not just an article talking about it.
    https://zenodo.org/record/8765...

  3. Re:Biggest challenge is avoidance. by HornWumpus · · Score: 2

    If CERN creates small black holes, so do cosmic ray impacts.

    Also note: The atomic bomb tests didn't knock a hole in the bottom of the oceans and allow them to drain.

    --
    John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  4. Filling Needs by aprentic · · Score: 2

    I love seeing documents like this.
    A lot of cool stuff gets built because someone has a need for it.
    My current employer (cloudant.com) got started the same way. A couple of LHC researchers couldn't get the data storage throughput levels they needed with existing solutions so they built a new one.
    I'm sure if you look around you can find tons of stuff that comes from papers like this.

  5. Non-spammy link, actual document (PDF) by dsinc · · Score: 2

    http://zenodo.org/record/8765/...

  6. CERN Computing Center by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Some numbers about the computing power at the CERN computing center (July 2013):

    Number of machines: 17,000 processors with 85,000 cores (Source)
    All physics computing is done using the Linux operating system and commodity PC hardware. There are few Solaris server machines as well, especially for databases (Oracle).

  7. Heard a talk from a CERN physicist by werepants · · Score: 2

    They are collecting an incredible amount of data every instant that this machine is running - they've got extremely capable processing that combs through terabits of data and discards the 99.9% that is irrelevant, so that they merely have to store gigabits to disk (as it is, they have an incredible amount of storage on site). Some pretty impressive computing they have to go through before they even begin to look at the data.

  8. Billions of dollar in the lab by Rinikusu · · Score: 2

    And we still have to drink Sanka.

    --
    If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai