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The Life of an ATLAS Physicist At CERN

Posted by Soulskill on from the smashing-particles-for-fun-and-profit dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Anyone with even a passing interest in the sciences must have wondered what it's like to work at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN. What's it like working in the midst of such concentrated brain power? South African physicist Claire Lee, who works right on ATLAS – one of the two elements of the LHC project that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson in 2012 — explains what a day in the life of a CERN worker entails. She says, "My standard day is usually comprised of some mix of coding and attending meetings ... There are many different types of work one can do, since I am mostly on analysis this means coding, in C++ or Python — for example, to select a particular subset of events that I am interested in from the full set of data. This usually takes a couple of iterations, where we slim down the dataset at each step and calculate extra quantities we may want to use for our selections.

The amount of data we have is huge – petabytes of data per year stored around the world at various high performance computing centers and clusters. It’s impossible to have anything but the smallest subset available locally – hence the iterations – and so we use the LHC Computing Grid (a specialized worldwide computer network) to send our analysis code to where the data is, and the code runs at these different clusters worldwide (most often in a number of different places, for different datasets and depending on which clusters are the least busy at the time)."

7 of 34 comments (clear)

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  3. Accelerator data outsourced by jovius · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now anyone can help to analyze the data: http://www.higgshunters.org/

  4. Thank You for Not Insulting Our Intelligence by Kunedog · · Score: 2

    Thank you, /., for posting an article about a woman in STEM that (for once) contains no clickbaiting headline, libel about entire groups committing discrimination & misogyny & harassment, nor the usual thinly veiled, anvilicious feminist agenda. It really is refreshing.

  5. What it's really like ... by tommeke100 · · Score: 2

    I had a friend who was a PhD student in Experimental Physics in the late 90s.
    As part of his lab's obligations, he had to do some grunt/shift work at CERN about a week every month.
    He said unless your life is Physics 24/7, it gets boring pretty quickly. A lot of people there only talk about physics, they have no other hobbies.
    There was not much to do besides the Physics aspect.

    This seems to have changed though judging from the article, there seems to be social clubs which is certainly an improvement. Still, she (the woman in the interview) says the turn-over rate is huge, people are send there at the beginning of their PhD and get back to their home labs after a while. Looks like that aspect hasn't changed but that's probably true for most University Labs in the world.

    1. Re:What it's really like ... by claire_lee · · Score: 2

      Hi! I'm Claire (from the interview) Well, I can't say what it was like in the 90's :) but there is a good social side now, especially among the younger people, though there is certainly the possibility of ending up in the "CERN bubble" where you do nothing but physics and never even go off site when visiting (there is a basic hotel and various cafeterias on site). As for the turnover rate, it gives you a very different perspective on making close friendships, since people can cycle in and out quite quickly, so things like facebook, skype etc get pretty important in terms of maintaining friendships. I've been pretty lucky that I've been based at CERN for the past 3 years, so the crossover with friends depends only on 1 person's schedule of visiting CERN, rather than 2, where we would see each other much less.

  6. Python + ROOT "C++" = Python by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 2

    Possibly because it often isn't coding in real C++. In ATLAS, and particle physics in general, we use this awful data analysis package called ROOT which is about the worst example of C++ code you can possibly imagine (although it has significantly improved over the years). This package uses a C++ interpreter so that you can write C++ scripts. Sadly this interpreter cannot implement the full set of C++ so major bits of functionality are missing like virtual functions so it's hard to really call this C++.

    Unfortunately, while there are many issues with ROOT, it is incredibly fast at I/O and has lots of features which do what we need (if you can navigate past the bugs, memory leaks and dodgy documentation). One way to do help with this is to use the Python interface so many of us use the Python interface as a shield from the full horror of ROOT. The other alternative is to write compiled C++ code which gives you the complete C++ functionality but still leaves you with the minefield of linking to ROOT. To give an example of how bad this can be a few years ago they had a bug which made you code dependent on the comments i.e. by adding a comment line the code generated a duplicate symbol error when linked. After a day of tracking this down to a pre-processor macro I was told by the root development team that they already knew about this bug but could not fix it...that was also the day I switched to using the Python interface!