Content about physics and astronomy

Physicists can tell the future — or at least foresee multiple possible versions of it. They do this through computer simulations. Simulations can help scientists predict what will happen when a particular kind of particle hits a particular kind of material in a particle detector. But physicists are not the only scientists interested in predicting how particles and other matter will interact. This information is critical in multiple fields, especially those concerned about the effects of radiation. Physicists and other scientists use the GEANT4 toolkit to identify problems before they occur.

Monday 29 September marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, otherwise known as CERN, located near Geneva, Switzerland. A new book, entitled 'From Physics to Daily Life', highlights some of the many ways in which technology developed at CERN has impacted upon society at large.

Bob Jones, the head CERN openlab, writes in this book about the growth of distributed computing and the vital role this technology plays across a wide range of academic fields and business sectors.

Last week, iSGTW attended the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’14) in Leipzig, Germany. The event featured a range of speakers representing a wide variety of research domains. Awards given by PRACE and Germany’s Gauss Centre for Supercomputing highlighted some of the outstanding research on show at the event. And, of course, the new TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced.

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.

Research output amounts to much more than just academic papers. It is important that datasets, and the software used to analyze them, are also properly cited and that the researchers behind these are given credit for their work. Preserving software and making it citable is also vital in ensuring that scientific results are reproducible by other research groups.

After serving fusion research for four years, Europe's High Performance Computer for Fusion has now completed its operations, with fusion modeling work moving to the significantly more powerful Helios computer in Rokkasho, Japan. Helios is a Japanese-European facility and has a peak performance of around 1.5 petaFLOPS.

Since being launched in 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 probes have been on an epic journey to the very edge of our solar system. Now, Domenico Vicinanza has harnessed the power of grid computing to create an uptempo piece of classical music from the data collected by the probes.

Last month, local OpenStack users from France and Switzerland held a meeting at CERN. iSGTW discusses the event with Tim Bell, a member of the OpenStack management board and leader of the Operating Systems and Infrastructure Services group within CERN’s IT department. Bell explains the vital role OpenStack plays in enabling CERN to flexibly tailor its computing resources to meet demand, as well as its importance for other organizations across the globe.

For roughly two decades, scientists have struggled to understand the ratio of lithium isotopes found within the bellies of the oldest stars in the universe. Now, with the aid of high-performance computing, an international group of researchers has put this cosmic problem to rest.

The CMS collaboration — one of the two experiments responsible for discovering the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — is set to make a significant portion of its data open to the public. The collaboration is also working with Finland’s IT Center for Science to give high-school students access to this data and to enable them to carry out some simple particle-physics analysis.