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May 18, 2007
Universities Prepare for Data Deluge from CERN Collider
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WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., May 17 -- The world's largest science experiment, a physics experiment designed to determine the nature of matter, will produce a mountain of data. And because the world's physicists cannot move to the mountain, an army of computer research scientists is preparing to move the mountain to the physicists.
Thomas Hacker, a research assistant professor in Purdue University's Discovery Park Cyber Center and with Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), says the particle physics collider experiment taking place at the European nuclear physics facility CERN will involve scientists around the world.
"Researchers usually have to be in the same location as the instrument to access to the data," Hacker says. "In this case, to bring the data to the researchers, we are building a huge scientific instrument that spans the globe to bring the data to the researchers."
At universities across the United States and at other institutions around the world, teams of computer research scientists and physicists are preparing for the largest physics experiment ever.
"Like an exercise session getting you ready for the big game, we've been going to the physics gym," Hacker says. "We are testing the ability of the infrastructure using simulation data. At Purdue, everyone is building and testing systems to make sure the computing infrastructure is ready when the detector comes online later this year."
The collider will give protons a pop hoping to catch a glimpse of the Big Bang, or at least the subatomic particles that are thought to have last been seen at the big event 10 billion to 15 billion years ago that led to the formation of the universe. The CERN collider will begin producing data in November, and from the trillions of collisions of protons it will generate 15 petabytes of data per year.
By comparison, 15 petabytes would be the equivalent of all of the information in all of the university libraries in the United States seven times over. It would be the equivalent of 22 Internets, or more than 1,000 Libraries of Congress. And there is no search function.
"Once this data is distributed to the physicists at the universities, they will require massive amounts of computing power and data storage in order to analyze it," Hacker says. "When the data transfer is live, we will stream data out to physicists as we quickly as we can - real time if possible."
The experiment has a name only a scientist could love: the CERN CMS project. CERN is the abbreviation for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and CMS is the abbreviation for compact muon solenoid, a type of electromagnet.
CMS is an electronic detector that is searching for never-before-detected subatomic particles, especially a particle known as Higgs boson, which is a missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the theory of particle physics (boson is the name physicists give subatomic particles with particular properties). If discovered, it would be an entirely new type of matter.
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