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Published online 22 July 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.967
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Physicists brace themselves for LHC 'data avalanche'
Particle collider will produce 700 megabytes of data every second.
As physicists prepare to inject the first stream of particles into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in August, they are are bracing themselves for a 'data avalanche' from the multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator.
Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum conference in Barcelona, Spain, on 20 July, the LHC team from CERN, the European particle-physics centre near Geneva, Switzerland, revealed some of the mind-bogglingly large numbers involved.
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Good article. Waiting for the results of the new atom smasher. Tony Conca
20km? I realize that this is irrelivent, but they put this in the article: How did they get this figure? There are about 31,557,600 seconds/year (I'm using a Julian year of 365.25 days, for simplicity). They are producing 700 MB/second. There can be anywhere from 650MB/CD to 900MB/CD, but 700MB/CD is normal (how convenient!). 1CD is 1.2mm thick. Therefore (31,557,600 seconds/year) * (700MB/second) * (1CD/700MB) * (0.0012m/CD) * (.001m/km) = about 38 kilometers! How did they get 20 kilometers? I'm curious what figures they used, because even using the minimum CD-ROM capacity of 650mb and rounding the days to 365 (cd thickness and meter-to-kilometer conversions don't change often), they would only be recording about 340MB/second. I know this is trivial (I laugh every time I see professional physicists doing such "reality checks" even though they don't seem to reveal much true physical intuition regarding the phenomenon in question), but like I said, they brought it up!
I am excited, scared, extremely emotional over this event which is about to happen. I pray to God up above all goes well. Amen!
20 km of cds works out to about 12 hours per day of running time. I guess they have to sleep sometimes!
i am no proffesional when it comes to physics , yet the whole geneva particle accelarator theorys have my mouth watering. i wonder will we see the changing of space flight and common uses of rockets with what is found with the first experiments. more sciance fiction now , but with the understanding of the forces that bind the universe together , i hope we find a link to a new wave in stella motion, that will enable say a quasar drive , event horizon type stuff. with the opening of microscopic black holes , which on a scale to the universe ,what will be the long term effects, how much could we learn of gravity, and will we one day manipulate it . or will a common attractor theory come into play and we find ourselves stairing into the abbys the other side. i just wish to see us gaining deeper understanding to further flights into the universe , maybe visit other gallaxies , so much to learn , i hope it all comes to light and use in future times.now.thankyou
They should burn their data on DVD-ROMs instead. That'll make the stack shorter! But seriously, we're all excitedly looking forward to this experiment. And I'm a biologist!
20Km origin? Perhaps this might help from: Nature Insight Review The Large Hadron Collider Vol448 19 July 2007 Pg295."This adds up to an annual volume of the order of 10 petabytes for the LHC experiments." 1 Petabyte= 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. 1 700MB CD =737,277,952 bytes but you typically lose the 37MB in formating. So about 700Mb/CD is close. At 10 Petabytes/yr and 700Mb/CD and 1.2mm/cd thickness I think you get about 19.3Km. Add a few percent increase for the CD's base spindle shoulder anti-scratch riser to lock-in recess in the top CD below and one can imagine getting about 20Km ideally -provided they don't get crushed. Unless they have my new puppy...then all bets are off...
"They hope to uncover evidence for the Higgs boson, a hypothetical particle believed to confer mass on other particles in the quantum zoo." Is it ethical for us to indulge in such multi-million-dollar projects when we are not even sure of what we are looking for? (Other fields benefiting from the project here is sales talk, and an escape clause when the primary objective remains highly questionable.) Physics today tells us, quite as an abstract definition, that mass is the quantitative or numerical measure of a body’s inertia, that is, of its resistance to being accelerated. In real terms, though, we still haven’t a clue what mass is fundamentally. The mainstream is absolutely silent when a breakthrough explanation is provided not only for mass (and inertia) but also for all other such entities and phenomena in nature. Please take a moment to access (1), a short item which has also the link to a one-page summary. Funding agencies, do take note for the sake of the future of basic science, or kindly put this crank out of circulation early, such as with a simple reply to the simple physics question posed in (1). Thank you. (1) www.sittampalam.net/DOE.pdf