Content about Project Profile

  Image of the week - ATLAS (Click on this link or the photo above to get the rotating, 360-degree, panoramic view, with natural sound.)ATLAS In a continuing series, Peter McCready has been creating panoramic views of all the large experiments of the LHC. ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) was shot using a Nikon professional digital, single lens reflex camera, attached to a tripod that allows for a 360-degree, rotating view. For each image, 102 separate, individual photos were shot,  then stitched together into one seamless 40MP spherical image. Each image takes as much as four weeks to complete in the his digital darkroom. When coupled with ambient sound that he recorded at the site, the user gets what McCready calls a  “Virtual Reality” experience. Image courtesy of Peter McCready    

Profile - People behind the LHC grid: Wesley Smith The trigger makes the first decision, on whether to keep an event . . . or throw it out.  Image courtesy of CERN iSGTW: What do you do?Wesley Smith: I work at the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), where my job is to throw away 99.999 percent of the data we record.What we’re hoping to do is like looking for a needle in a haystack, only with multiple haystacks. I want to remove as much hay as possible, without losing any needles.iSGTW: How did you become interested in physics?Wesley Smith: I grew up in San Francisco, where we lived one block away from Mel Schwartz of Stanford University, who won the Nobel Prize in Particle Physics. I knew his son, we went to elementary school together, and our parents spent a lot of time together. It was a connection that stayed almost 40 years, and a powerful influence. Then when I was in college at Harvard, I studied under Carlo Rubbia (former Director General of CERN,1989-1994, and Nobel prize-winner in physics) and Larry Sulak.My first s

  Image of the week - One view of the LHC (Click on this link or the photo above to get the rotating, 360-degree, panoramic view, with natural sound.)One view of the Large Hadron Collider To give an idea of the enormity of the project at CERN, Peter McCready took a series of panoramic views of each of the  experiments. Last week, we showed ALICE, here's a view of one portion of the LHC. McCready creates these images using digital cameras mounted atop a customized tripod apparatus that allows him to take wrap-around images of up to a complete 360 rotation. Each image requires more than one hundred separate, individual photoraphs to be shot, which are then stitched together to form one seamless spherical image. The completed photo takes up 40MP. Image courtesy of Peter McCready    

Feature - People behind the LHC grid: Jamie Shiers Some of the different projects involved, from across the globe. Image courtesy of Jamie Shiers Jamie Shiers is part of grid support for the Large Hadron Collider, and has been working on the LHC for 16 of his 25 years at CERN. Dressed in sneakers and jeans, and looking tan after a recent grid conference in Brazil, he talked with iSGTW at CERN’s Restaurant 1.  iSGTW: What first got you interested in physics? JS: It could be something in the genes, I suppose. I and two of my three brothers  became physicists—and we’ve all passed through CERN.  For me, what helped to get me hooked was a book about physics, called “Mister Tompkins in Wonderland,” that I read at age 14 or 15, by George Gamow—a Russian physicist who worked with Niels Bohr. He wrote about a world in which light was slowed down enough that you could see the effects of relativity. It was a great book that turned me on to physics . . . that, and the old c

Feature - (Almost) starting up the LHC: a view from the front lines A welder works on the interconnection between two of the LHC's superconducting magnet systems, in the LHC tunnel, earlier this year. Image courtesy of CERN On Thursday, 8 August, CERN announced that it would make the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on 10 September, with the first test scheduled for the weekend of 9 August.To find out what it is like from the point of view of those actually building the LHC and installing the equipment, iSGTW caught up with Mike Lamont of LHC Machine Operations for a few minutes, just  before workers were about to start the initial steps of a preliminary, low-energy, “pre-startup.” iSGTW: What are your feelings, after all this time and effort?Lamont: “At the moment, my general feeling is an overwhelming one of relief, actually. We’ve pulled all the bits together; we’ve got the ring more or less cooled now; we’re underway.”“We’re up t

  Image of the week - Go ask ALICE (Click on this link or the photo above to get the rotating, 360-degree, panoramic view, with natural sound.)GO ASK ALICE Peter McCready created panoramic views of ALICE (above), ATLAS, CMS and the LHC using Nikon professional digital, single lens reflex cameras attached to a custom rig that allows for views of up to 360 degrees atop a carbon-fiber tripod. For each image, exactly 102 separate, individual photos are shot at varying exposures (some a little under- and some a little over-exposed) to capture the full dynamic range of the lighting during the shoot. They were then stitched together into one seamless 40MP spherical image using a MacBook Pro and Photoshop over the course of as many as four weeks of post-production digital darkroom work. Sound was recorded using Marantz broadcast quality solid state recorders,  with ambient audio loop isolation and extraction using Peak Pro.When asked why he loves to do what he terms “Virtual Reality photographs&r

Feature - Chronopolis By storing data digitally on Chronopolis, the equivalent of 2.5 million trees' worth of paper will be saved. Image courtesy of Roly Powderhill, sxc.hu How do you store 50 terabytes of archived data across a wide range of domains, and save 2.5 million trees worth of paper to boot?Digitally, with Chronopolis.Formally called the Chronopolis Digital Preservation Demonstration Project and funded by the Library of Congress , the project is being run by The San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, and partner institutions, which includes the UC San Diego Libraries, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Together, they are building a scalable nationwide grid infrastructure that can be expanded at any time to meet the needs of the data providers. The system uses data scattered across the country.  Image courtesy of Chronopolis   Long-term preservation M

Feature - In this case, it is brain surgery New, grid-based imaging technology has the potential to change neurosurgery. Image courtesy of Phil Beard, sxc.hu To the edge Branching through your brain, a complex system of arteries, capillaries and veins feeds the organ that allows you to think. While the shape of each person’s network is similar in the basics to everyone else’s, it is unique in the particulars. This presents a challenge for neurosurgeons. A new type of three-dimensional imaging and processing tool, based upon grid-computing, stands ready to change the way doctors perform neurosurgery. Called HemeLB, it won the Transformational Science Challenge Award at TeraGrid ’08 in Las Vegas, US, last month. The current technology neurologists use allows for a patient’s vasculature to mapped by the processing of MRI scans. These scans, created with magnetic resonance imaging, use magnetic fields and radio waves to create pictures of bodily tissues. Typically these are two-dimensional images:

Image of the week - Fun factoids “We report, you decide.”Image courtesy of YouTube“Developers of the grid say the net will be obsolete . . . ” “You'll be able to download a full-length feature film in seconds.” “The first test (of the grid) is this gigantic atom-smasher. Assuming it won’t blow up the world, which there is some talk it will do . . .”These were just some of the things said about the grid in a 2-minute story on a well-known cable news channel whose motto is “Fair and Balanced.”However, it is fun to watch what feels like a physics version of the spoof ‘news’ program The Daily Show.But we shouldn’t pick on any one media outlet. engadget summed up some of the more outrageous coverage with the headline “CERN creates a new super-fast internet, invites tons of people to a deathmatch.”In an effort to set the record straight—and give at least some credit wher

Feature - Friendly but fierce competition for the Higgs This diagram plots the limit (at 95% confidence level) of Higgs production (y-axis) for different possible Higgs masses (x-axis). Each mark along the y-axis is a multiple of the Standard Model rate of Higgs production, and this rate is shown as a straight line at "1." The more data Fermilab scientists collect, the closer their observed limits will get to the Standard Model rate.  Notice that the "observed" line comes vertically closest to 1, the Standard Model rate, at 160 on the x-axis. Fermilab physicists have amassed nearly enough data to make a statement about whether the Higgs exists at the mass value 160 GeV/c2.Image courtesy of the  Tevatron New Phenomena & Higgs Working Group on behalf of CDF and D0. The two Tevatron experiments at Fermilab, CDF and D0, have nearly ruled out the hoped-for mass value for the Higgs boson—the particle regarded by some as one of the last big mysteries of the universe. Its disc

  Feature - WISDOM unplugged: malaria drug-leads graduate to the wet lab The WISDOM project screened one million molecules for their potential to bind to and inhibit “plasmepsin,” a protein essential for survival of the malaria parasite. The parasite can be transferred to a human host via the mosquito vector.Image courtesy of PD-USGOV Hot on the heels of their initial success, WISDOM collaborators have high hopes as their anti-malaria drug-leads move from computer processers to petri dishes.“We’re excited to be at this stage,” says Ana Lucia Da Costa, WISDOM researcher at CNRS, France. “I can’t wait till we get the next set of results back.”The WISDOM project, a collaboration of eight core institutions in five countries, began searching for anti-malaria drugs in 2005. Rather than go straight to the lab, the team used a grid-powered software program to screen for potential drug-leads, searching for small molecules—called ligands—that could bind to and disable the mal

  Feature - The new Nimbus: first steps in the clouds Cloud computing services provide users with flexible compute capacity, allowing each user to lease a portion of the greater “cloud” of resources.Image courtesy of exper While grids are composed of many diverse resources, their applications usually require a very specific, validated environment. As a result, applications that work on a developer’s desktop may only function “out of the box” on a small fraction of the total number of compute resources potentially available to scientists on the grid. This is one of the primary obstacles users face in grid computing.A grid of your virtual machinesOne solution is to take the developer’s desktop and scale it to hundreds of nodes by mapping the desktop onto hundreds of virtual machines and deploying them onto grid resources. To facilitate this mode of using the grid, researchers at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago recently announced the availability of