Interested In Computing? Take A Look At The LHC
If you’re interested in computing, you might be interested in what’s happening within the particle physics community right now - in particular, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Particle physics not your bag? Well, remember that the World Wide Web came out of this community… and the computing they’re doing right now could help pave the way for the web to move the next level.
The particle physics community is building a new kind of world wide web to enable world-wide distributed computing - they need to analyse the data that will be generated by the LHC. And the LHC will generate a lot of data. If you’re lucky, your Internet connection might run at 8 or 24 megabits per second ; whereas, the world-wide network that the particle physics community has built runs at 1000 megabits per second i.e. a 1Gbps world-wide network. The kinds of ways we would all use the Internet would look very different if we had 1Gbps Internet connections.
Take a look at the following episode of The Scoble Show, for a tour of CERN, where the LHC is built.
Now, I’m particularly interested in what these guys are doing, because one my companies is developing a new technology that can potentially generate the same kind of massive data volumes as the LHC does. However, I think this area is of general interest to anyone that follows developments in computing. There are many challenges in this kind of large-scale grid computing (I’ve written about these before); but the particle physics guys have overcome enough of these to make a fully functional high-performance grid - for both CPU and data.
So - their world wide computing grid is working right now, ready for the analysis of LHC data. The particle physics guys have provided a live view of their computing grid, so you can watch the computations and the data moving around the network. Launch the computing grid live view - Please note that it may take a few seconds to pop up after you see the linked page, so be patient. And, it might take up to a minute before the visualization connects to the data sources. If you watch for a while, you’ll see the visualizations not only of the computing, but of data moving around the world at high speed.
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