Content about LHC

iSGTW interviews Jorge Gomes, member of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) executive board, ahead of next month’s EGI Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. He explains why it is vital to support research with grid computing, as well as with a range of related IT services. “In order for researchers to be able to collaborate and share data with one another efficiently, the underlying IT infrastructures need to be in place,” says Gomes. “With the amount of data produced by research collaborations growing rapidly, this support is of paramount importance.”

LHC@home recently celebrated a decade since its launch in 2004. Through its SixTrack project, the LHC@home platform harnesses the power of volunteer computing to model the progress of sub-atomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light around CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The number of projects supported by LHC@home is growing and the platform now has over 100,000 users from across the globe.

This year’s International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’14) in Leipzig, Germany, is now just one month away. iSGTW speaks to Niko Neufeld ahead of his talk at the event, ‘The Boson in the Haystack’, which will take place during the session on ‘Emerging Trends for Big Data in HPC’ on Wednesday 25 June.

CERN and the Wigner Research Centre for Physics last week inaugurated the Hungarian data center in Budapest, marking the completion of the facility hosting the extension for CERN computing resources. About 500 servers, 20,000 computing cores, and 5.5 petabytes of storage are already operational at the site. The capacity at Wigner will be remotely managed from CERN, substantially extending the capabilities of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid Tier-0 activities.

Warp drives aren’t just the stuff of science fiction. Researchers inspired by Star Trek are currently working to make the dream of interstellar travel for human civilization a reality – one day. While the kinks are being worked out, distributed computing may help address the multi-dimensional issues of warp travel.

This year's Turing Festival had a session called CERN: Big Questions, Big Science, Big Technology. Speakers talked about its history of physics theory, engineering, and computing.

The Higgs boson-like particle has been turned into music. Not only is this a way to bridge the gap between science and the public, but it could enable researchers to hear their work in a new light.

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider have identified a new particle that is consistent with the Higgs boson. Confidence levels are as high as 5.0 sigma. This means the probability of the background alone fluctuating up by this amount or more is about one in three million. The director general of CERN, Rolf Heuer, said this global success was only made possible because of the experiments, infrastructure, and grid computing.

Europe's leading neutron source, and international experiments, and projects, are setting up policies and tools to make raw data more open, streamlining cross-disciplinary research.

For the last 40 years, the way that large-scale services, such as global banks, and scientific experiments, such as the LHC at CERN, have been managing their data has been reminiscent of Lyman Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz:there's only one tried-and-tested path, a 'yellow brick road', and it's relational databases. But over the last couple of years, some new, non-relational database models have emerged and may represent the next step in the evolution of data management.