Hello All,
Yes I know I did a post yesterday, but as the Hadron Collider is such an interesting topic, I thought I would write about it and also focus on ‘the grid’ section of it.
Now as I would expect, due to the large media coverage on the collider, you should know what it does, and a basic idea of how it works. If not I will say what I understood from it:
The genereal purpose of the collider is to firstly get a more detailed view into physics and to understand better such events as the ‘Big Bang’. The collider is a circular machine covering a distance of 27km, passing through both Switzerland and France, but also involving overe 100 different countries in its development.
The collider works by firing particles into acclerators, which bring them to almost light speed. By doing this the particles are ‘boosted’ to hold massive amounts of energy. Once powerful enough and fast enough, two beams of partcicles are fired into the 27km tunnel at opposite directions, and are then forced to collide.
Well what you have just read is a basic understanding I found whilst reading about the collider.
Anyway, focussing more on the grid. When these particles collide they produce massive amounts of data which need to be collected. This is done by detectors placed around the tunnel, searching for various different things, such as the ‘God Particle’ and ‘anti-matter’. Naturally each detector has been given a name to suit its purpose!
For this a new computer system known as ‘The Grid’, the largest on the planet has been created. This system has been designed to cope with and collect around 700MB of data a second and millions of GB’s a year! Even with a system like this, it is expected not all the data will be able to be dealt with. To get over this, and how this system got its name (‘The Grid’), scientists are sharing the data collected so that it can also processed by others. The data is only being shared with a handful of institutes, for many reasons, but one main one being, you need a Super Computer to process the data!
Where the start of the Grid is held in Geneva, where it is said the WWW was born, some also say due to the development of The Grid, a new age of computing has begun. If you think of the storage and the processing power that is required to fuel a project like this, it certainly could look like a change in computing. One example could be the steering away from the traditional magnetic storage, and the incresead development of holographic storage perhaps.
Well anyway as you would have found this is an exciting subject and I will look forward to seeing what it brings us both in science and technology!
Finally to finish off check out the link below to find out more about the collider. Also see the video for more of a ‘different’ way to learn about the collider:
BBC – ‘Big Bang’ experiment starts well
Bye
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