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CERN Engineers Have To Identify and Disconnect 9,000 Obsolete Cables (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, has grand plans to update the world's largest particle accelerator complex in the next few years. But engineers have identified a barrier to the upgrade: there's no space for new cables in the injectors that accelerate particles before they enter the LHC. In the past, when parts of the accelerators have been upgraded or added to, engineers would often additionally replace the cables that connected them. In the process, they would leave in place the old cables that were no longer in use. Now, a heap of obsolete cables are blocking the way to install new ones needed for the accelerator’s next big upgrade. To make space, CERN engineers have set out to identify and remove the old, unused cables. All 9,000 of them.
Sell them to audiophiles. You have a limited supply of cables used in a unique, world-class esoteric application. That's a perfect match for people with deep pockets and shallow skulls.
9000 cable... and no labeling
Praise Buddha that removing abandoned cables is now a code requirement in the US. I remember an old server room where the manager wanted to raise the floor 6" so they could fit in more cables. 12" apparently wasn't enough...
Tell me: you have an app for posting this nonsense in /., don't you?
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
otherwise someone is in for a long night
cern manager: we've disconnected 4 cables...can anyone confirm on the console that these are disconnected?
cern engineer: nothing new here chief.
cern researcher: my panini press stopped working.
cern manager: ok wrong cable
cern engineer: janice had a panini press in her office?! I want one
cern manager: guys lets not get off track here...
cern mathematician: Where do I file a report about the espresso maker? its seemed to quit working entirely.
cern laureate: my jack lalane power juicer just cut out and im mid-smoothie, this is urgent...
cern manager: just use the vitamix in my lab.
cern engineer: vitamix?! am i the only one here whos been drinking freeze dry sanka for 5 years?!
cern mathematician: of course not Ive been drinking your sanka too...
Good people go to bed earlier.
LHC.....No wireless. Cost more than Fermilab. Lame.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
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One of the few silver linings of the Hurricane Sandy damage: they finally pulled tons of old copper out of the tunnels and cable-runs and replaced it with fiber, because there was finally no way to be sure which was obsolete and which was current-but-damaged.
Keep on tinkering guys, the world will collapse without you. The entire scientific publishing industry would disappear without your massive overload of papers too.
The engineers should turn it into a game: count how many cables they can disconnect in a hour and then try and beat that record. They'll be done in no time!
Summation 2
I've been in relatively new commercial buildings where they had to replace entire conduits because they were literally packed with cables (most of them inactive). 9000 actually seems low for CERN.
They just need to make sure they don't disconnect the cable that keeps the speed of light constant.
If they know they are 9000, that would suggest they have already identified them.
It's not like the New York City Subway, where a combination of age and bad record keeping in the early years, combined with the fact that it's 3 or 4 different systems that merged into one system has led to most of the engineers not knowing what's down there at all.
You ask how many unused cables are in the NY Subway, and you'll get a shrug. Nobody knows. Hell, my favorite is when they break through a wall and find track and a train that nobody knew about for 60 years.
9000 unused cables? Pfft. That's not that impressive.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Imagine trying to deal with this.
Nope, no sig
In related news, someone had to shovel the shit out of the barns for some farm research at a university in Iowa last night.
In other words, yeah there's maintenance and cleaning work associated with almost any non-trivial research project; just ask a grad student if you need more examples. Swapping out 9000 cables sounds probably like a day at the beach in some lines of work.
I know what they're going through......
(I seriously had 30+ lbs of small random cables piled up in the parking lot of a Galveston gas station one time as I pulled them out)
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Reading TFA, all these cables are disconnected but still in the trays. It doesn't say if these are copper or fiber, and from that pic it's impossible to tell. If I ever did something like that at any of my corporate cabling jobs I would have been fired pretty quickly. Even at our smallest job we always labeled the cables, even if just with a sharpie. But for copper, a tone generator would make the job far easier. This is basic networking stuff, CERN has some of the smartest people on the planet working there...I expected better from them LOL
It's VERY frightening that a device that could potentially eventually produce a particle that could turn our planet into a blob of stranglets has cabling that looks like that. Perhaps instead of whomever they let do their cabling they should have hired some actual professional cablers, it's not like it costs $$$ to have it done correctly retaliative to the cost of the LHC.
One more cable and they could have gone Super Saiyan on the task.
As a lab manager I had to institute a rule that ANY cable that didn't have a label was going to be removed when found with no warning.
Back in the day of floppy disks we had a similar rule. If the disk wasn't important enough to justify a label it was to be considered blank. I feel the same way about labeling cables. If you aren't disciplined about this stuff it can get really out of hand really fast.
It's amazing how much cabling gets forgotten about when you have a chaotic lab environment and new stuff coming in all the time (we do hardware evaluations and other systems integration work.) There's never any money left over for structured cabling once it's been spent on all the fancy new hardware. Even if we invested in structured cabling it would turn into an unstructured mess quickly. I have racks that look like those Magic Eye pictures; the only thing that will solve it is unplugging everything. I'm sure world class scientists can't be bothered to label anything if we can't!
I am reminded of the days of wire-wrap circuit boards. hunders of wires in a few colors at most forming a rats nest of interconnects on the back. All done by hand from post to post where you had to count pins by eye to find the right post each time. Chance of 100% correct wiring was geometrically vanishing.
The problem was not discovering the connections you had failed to make (which is easily done with a continuity tester) but finding the connections that were mistakenly wired the wrong pins.
So what you did was go find a filament transformer (these were high current low voltage transformers used to power the filaments in tubes). then you put one probe on one pin, and another probe on every other pin it was not supposed to be connected to. This is not as complex as it sounds since normally one pin is not connected to more than 3 or 5 other pins. So once you eliminate those, you can just slide the probe along the sides of all the other socket pins.
The current was so large that even a momentary connection would vaporize the wire if it was incorrectly wired. A continuity tester would not have worked well because the response time for the human to test all N^2 connections and look at the continuity tester was too long.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Have gnu, will travel.
Get that new guy gordon freeman to do the work.
It seems they just got this thing on-line and up to full capacity in the last couple of years. Now it's already obsolete?
I must be getting old or something: stuff seems to change so fast it's obsolete before even being used. Should I get bell-bottom jeans? I might still have a pair from the last bell era.
Table-ized A.I.
If you have 12 inches of abandoned cable, you just reclassify it as a 'felted conductor structural element' and never touch it again(unless you are doing some serious renovation, in which case you saw it out in chunks as you would any other solid structural material).
Interestingly... Or not... it had flooded so many times that they did eventually need to have a hazmat team decontaminate the space. Ant that is why the stock exchange is now a gym...
and it'll be twice as much work later on.
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Since the cables have been bombarded by high energy particles,....
LHC.....No wireless.
The magnets in the LHC require a ~9,000 amp current and the ability to dump it somewhere fast in the event of a quench. Care to explain how you plan to do that wirelessly? It's also worth pointing out that the part of the accelerator complex they are recabling was built in 1954, 13 years before Fermilab existed and 17 years before the first wireless packet network.
Book: Puzzles for Pleasure
Chapter: "Wire Wizards", page 73
* https://books.google.com/books...
The raised floor under me right now is 3' above the actual floor.
And it's only half full.
So far...
...but sometimes those labor- and time-saving ideas turn around a bite ya.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I had pretty much the same problem in the late 1990's when management FINALLY decided to give up Token Ring and rewire for Ethernet. The cable troughs in the building were packed slap full of IBM Type 1 and Type 2 cables with no where for the Cat5 to go. Five floors of a 20 story office building had to be stripped of the Token Ring Cables and have Cat 5 pulled at the same time we were transitioning from the IBM MAU's to 100 Mb switches on each floor with Gigabit fiber backbone.
Oh, one more thing.... Management didn't want any down time or overtime either...
Cable work is often times contracted out. One contractor makes a bid including the time to remove the old cabling even though it isn't specced, another contractor leaves the work to remove the cabling out because it isn't specced. The lower bid is accepted and funded.
The customer then asks the winning contractor why didn't remove the cables, Response "Not in the requirements". Customer then goes back for additional funding which is denied and the old cabling never gets removed. Seen it happen many times when mainframe facilities were re-purposed with racks for X86 servers.
To make space, CERN engineers have set out to identify and remove the old, unused cables. All 9,000 of them
And that, children, is what happens when decommissioning is not a concrete, well-thought off, first class phase in a system's life cycle.
Telephone companies used to have this exact problem. (Maybe they still do). Central offices contain a "mainframe", essentially a huge patch panel that connects cable pairs coming in the building to the switches. Technicians activated a given local loop by running a cross-connect pair. When service was discontinued, they'd often just disconnect the pair but leave it in the mainframe to clog things up for the future. I suspect this problem is decreasing with the growth of remote switching. E.g., AT&T U-verse terminates the customer loop in a VRAD cabinet in the local neighborhood instead of carrying it all the way to the central office.
...eighteen thousand cable ends begins with one snip.
Actually, it reminds me of the stories of utility companies in the Northeast pulling out random cables from other companies whenever they are doing an install if it makes their install easier.
And Ma Bell has been doing it for a century. Cable rack in the central offices gets crowded after just a few decades, otherwise.
There's precedent, there are specialized tools and procedures for error reduction, and worldwide there are at least dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people with lots of experience in this very specific field.
Only 9000? They haven't seen behind my computer desk.
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When the U.S. Air Force upgraded the electronics in its B-52 fleet several years ago, they removed a ton, literally, of old cabling in each aircraft. These were left over from previous upgrades and most were not even connected at either end. The civilian workforce at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma probably still includes some old-timers who remember how that was done. Having them advise the CERN workforce will definitely be cheaper than hiring Boeing, etc., to do this job.
Sad, but true, and management never learns that lesson. It will come back to bite you really hard, at the most inconvenient time and leaving you no choice. Ignoring these little things in favor of new stuff is really a bad way to do business. It is not sustainable and does a disservice to everyone involved.
ARE there 9000? Or is it... OVER 9000????!!!!!