I was surprised to see .cern as a TLD - i would not expect it to need a family of websites in the way .gov or .mil do.
CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
21–30 of 112 posts
Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
#22I was surprised to see .cern as a TLD - i would not expect it to need a family of websites in the way .gov or .mil do.
It's a brand gTLD, like .microsoft and .google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#Brand...
Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
All using ZFS, too
No they're not. At CERN physics data is on: * CTA for tape storage: https://cta.docs.cern.ch/v5/ * EOS for disk storage: https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/eos-web/ There is a large CEPH cluster as well but that isn't really used for physics data.
More specifically, from the EOS page:
> Data is stored natively in XFS filesystems on hard disks or SSDs or on virtualised back-end storage (e.g. RADOS block devices) or distributed filesystems like Lustre or CephFS.
Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
#24I was surprised to see .cern as a TLD - i would not expect it to need a family of websites in the way .gov or .mil do.
To be fair, if any org deserves a vanity TLD it's CERN
Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
#25I wonder whether the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider was a net positive or negative for science. If it continued to completion, it would have had almost 3x the beam energy of even the upgraded LHC in 2030 (20TeV vs. 7TeV). But the questions are fundamentally political, not scientific: Would SSC operations and funding have continued through the US economic challenges of 2001, 2008, and 2020? I could…
Perhaps SSC's cancellation avoided a nightmare scenario where all that energy beyond what was needed to find the Higgs was wasted. And perhaps Science as a whole benefited from diversion of resources away from fundamental particle physics.
Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
#26I feel like the title is a little overdramatic. They’re not saying goodbye to the LHC, they’re upgrading it to have 10x the power.
They're collecting 10X more data, at roughly the same energy per collision.
Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
All using ZFS, too
No they're not. At CERN physics data is on: * CTA for tape storage: https://cta.docs.cern.ch/v5/ * EOS for disk storage: https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/eos-web/ There is a large CEPH cluster as well but that isn't really used for physics data.
Interesting, they used to be the largest ZFS user.
Hard to Google for it without getting AI slop on it, but apparently they built their own stack in 2019.
Not sure I like their solution, "Meta-data is persisted in RocksDB databases using a proprietary KV store called QuarkDB." Unless QuarkDB has magically removed RocksDB's amazing ability to corrupt and lose data frequently, this whole thing sounds like a bad idea.
Also, their data is not stored on any one system (local XFS, Ceph, Lustre), a recipe for disaster.
Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
#28I visited CERN last July. Was lucky enough to get into a group tour. The tour guide was a postdoc researcher who said the only times that public tours are allowed to take an elevator down is during long shutdowns. So while they do this work on LHC might be the best time to swing by for a tour (I might even try to return).
Even without the descent, my tour was great with showing the 70 year timeline, historical early particle accelerator equipment, and a cool view of the ATLAS control room. The facility is awe inspiring and a testament to Europe's willingness to make long-term commitments to furthering science research for the public good.
Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
#29I wonder whether the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider was a net positive or negative for science. If it continued to completion, it would have had almost 3x the beam energy of even the upgraded LHC in 2030 (20TeV vs. 7TeV). But the questions are fundamentally political, not scientific: Would SSC operations and funding have continued through the US economic challenges of 2001, 2008, and 2020? I could…
Perhaps SSC's cancellation avoided a nightmare scenario where all that energy beyond what was needed to find the Higgs was wasted. And perhaps Science as a whole benefited from diversion of resources away from fundamental particle physics.
Perhaps. I do remember the discussion about whether the SSC consumed so much basic research funding that other areas would have their funding significantly constrained.
Basic research has such a long time horizon it's interesting to think of the fundamental grants that might have been affected. Quantum computing? CRISPR? mRNA?
Re: CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
#30I feel like the title is a little overdramatic. They’re not saying goodbye to the LHC, they’re upgrading it to have 10x the power.
They're collecting 10X more data, at roughly the same energy per collision.
The article says "10x luminosity", and here's what seems to be the explanation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Luminosity_Large_Hadron_C...
That's the wiki article for the new one. Says "Increasing LHC luminosity involves reduction of the beam size at the collision point, and either the reduction of bunch length and spacing, or significant increase in bunch length and population."
The linked article says the new one will have "between 140 and 200 proton–proton collisions in every bunch crossing, compared to around 60 during the last LHC run." So the "10x luminosity" seems to be composed of ~3x more protons at a time along with presumably a ~3x tighter focused beam.