Maybe not that bad, stopping the accelerator means the storage requirements drop now that data is no longer being taken. Storage is instead just used for simulation and reprocessing which is small in comparision. So long as the market recovers before HL-LHC starts and the data volume increases it'll be okay. If it doesn't...
They will buy the hardware last, at the end of LHC to get the best hw possible. Helium is a bigger problem, since CERN is the biggest Helium cryo-installation in the world...
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. A…
There's at least 3 copies of all the data and possibly more spread around the world at different Tier1 and Tier2 centers. The T1 and T2 centers are very likely using different filesystems and everything is checksummed pretty much at every major step (data generation, before and after any network transfers, before analysis, etc).
Am I the only one that feels three/four years is a mighty ambitious timeline for the upgrade? It seems to be a very significant undertaking…
It's been in the planning stages for at least 5-8 years at this point. The instruments and upgrades have been tested and validated so it's just putting stuff together and then validating/calibrating. Stuff can still happen like the splice issue and repairs.
I was visiting CERN on one of their Open Days during the previous shutdown. This is one of the rare occasion where visitors can enter the LHC. I walked for about 500m along the beam which is remarkably small despite all its protection. Standing inside LHCb (one of the experiments where they track collisions) was one of my most awe-inspiring moments about science and technology. Photos don’t do it justice. It’s a mult…
I'm a former LHCb physicist and I worked for years in the cavern, fixing the cables you saw :) Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think. There are the usual power dynamics you find in academia: PhD students and postdocs exploited to do service and technical work instead of independent research, careerism, researchers who have to worry more about symbolic roles and political aspects than actual research, as if the PhD->Postdoc->Tenure->Professor career model serves to create real expertise and not vice versa. In general (personally) I've felt a strong sense of frustration at how modern research in particle physics is producing papers that are all identical to each other and have no true scientific impact, other than increasing the h-index, hoping to get a permanent position somewhere. Forgive the outburst, I'm in the IT industry now and I'm feeling definitely better, but eventually it was great and educational to do research at CERN.
I 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.
I had to chuckle a week or so ago when I was bumbling across the internet and landed on an article that had a link to a nutjob page where the title was something like: "CERN found something so disturbing they had to shut down immediately". The nutjob article (yes, I did read it, LOL) suggested that they had found some universal truth maybe about God or aliens or something, and it scared them so much they just noped o…
I treat these nutjob articles as a subgenre of science fiction and when they're somewhat well written find them very entertaining. The author cosplaying investigative journalist, one part of the audience acting as if it's a real discovery and another part playing debunking and outrage, is all part of the performance and it's hilarious. Check out the flat earth movement, it's great entertainment all around!
I was visiting CERN on one of their Open Days during the previous shutdown. This is one of the rare occasion where visitors can enter the LHC. I walked for about 500m along the beam which is remarkably small despite all its protection. Standing inside LHCb (one of the experiments where they track collisions) was one of my most awe-inspiring moments about science and technology. Photos don’t do it justice. It’s a mult…
I totally feel you. I visited CERN in 2002 when LHC was already in construction and we also visited the construction site of one of the earliest detectors ever build there. This thing was really really huge. We also visited the data center of the detector with its multi-pass data collection system which at that time was super impressive. It was designed to collect Terabytes of data within a fraction of a second. The hardware was very impressive.
We also visited the central data center where one of Europe's internet backbones is hosted. The data silos were also very impressive. The amount of compute power and data storage available there were unimaginable high for that time. I think it will dwarf those numbers today while being not that impressive because data and compute density skyrocketed since then.
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.
I was too, and I was going to ask whether this is a good use of taxpayer money, as the ICANN fee for registering a TLD is $227,000. But given the fact that the Web was invented at CERN, I could imagine that they got a special deal.
Happy to learn about details if someone knows more!
I was visiting CERN on one of their Open Days during the previous shutdown. This is one of the rare occasion where visitors can enter the LHC. I walked for about 500m along the beam which is remarkably small despite all its protection. Standing inside LHCb (one of the experiments where they track collisions) was one of my most awe-inspiring moments about science and technology. Photos don’t do it justice. It’s a mult…
I'm a former LHCb physicist and I worked for years in the cavern, fixing the cables you saw :) Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think. There are the usual power dynamics you find in academia: PhD students and postdocs exploited to do service and technical work instead of independent research, careerism, researchers who have to worry mor…
I am in the industry too and I wish to get back to the academia sometimes. Sadly, CERN is not hiring Russians no matter what are their political convictions (I am pro-Ukraine, of course). But yes, as a Geneva resident, I was at the tunnels too (Alice), and I am always in awe every time I see this wonder of the modern world. Sometimes I wonder how actual humans could build this, much like people did for the pyramids.