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MASSIVE COMPUTING GRID POWERS
WORLD’S LARGEST PARTICLE ACCELERATOR
BY PAULA MUSICH
In november, when physicists at cern in swit- The network’s 10G-bps backbone, linking to
zerland begin their grand experiment using the 11 scientific data centers, forms the core of the
world’s largest particle accelerator—the Large Had- world’s largest international scientific grid service,
ron Collider, or LHC—computer scientists there which was created to enable scientists to handle
and across the globe will also put the world’s larg- the huge amount of data that will come out of the
est scientific computing grid through its paces. experiment.
PHOTOS COUR TES Y OF CERN
The success of the experiment—intended “The LHC is a 27-kilometer ring under-to answer such questions as what other ground that accelerates protons to high
particles exist in the universe that we don’t energy and smashes them together in the
know about—will rely in large part on a ring to produce a fireworks of
worldwide, high-speed network that will particles,” said Francois Grey,
allow scientists to harness the power of 100,000 director of I T communica-computers—mostly PCs—to process the tons of tions at CERN, in Geneva.
data generated by the experiment. “Huge underground detectors will pick up the sig-
The universe consists of particles of matter, and nals [ from the collisions] using millions of channels
scientists currently know only a tiny fraction of them. that will read out every 25 nanoseconds. The rate at
Gaining greater insight into what else makes up the which [the data] will come out [of the four detectors
universe will give them a greater understanding of in place] to be stored is in the hundreds of megabytes
the universe itself. per second.” [CONTINUED ON PAGE 26]
