What To Do With 15 Million Gigabytes Of Data

November 3, 2008

When it is fully up and running, the four massive detectors on the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva are expected to produce up to 15 million gigabytes, aka 15 petabytes, of data every year. Andreas Hirstius, manager of CERN Openlab and the CERN School of Computing, explains in November’s Physics World how computer scientists have risen to the challenge of dealing with this unprecedented volume of data.

When CERN staff first considered how they might deal with the large volume of data that the huge collider would produce when its two beams of protons collide, in the mid-1990s, a single gigabyte of disk space still cost a few hundred dollars and CERN’s total external connectivity was equivalent to just one of today’s broadband connections.

It quickly became clear that computing power at CERN, even taking Moore’s Law into account, would be significantly less than that required to analyse LHC data. The solution, it transpired during the 1990s, was to turn to "high-throughput computing" where the focus is not on shifting data as quickly as possible from A to B but rather from shifting as much information as possible between those two points.

More of the story,
click image

Posted in Computer Technology, Physics, Science and Technology