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Big bang day

If you’re reading this then obviously the world didn’t end on Wednesday, when that huge particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, got fired up for the first time over at CERN in Geneva. Although I should point out that no particles have actually collided yet — the LHC team hopes that will happen next week.

It’s not often that particle physics is picked up by the mainstream media, including the BBC and Time magazine. But in any case, I had absolutely no chance of getting away without hearing about it, because I share a building with a bunch of physics boffins — FibreSystems Europe is published by IOP Publishing, which is the not-for-profit publishing arm of the UK Institute of Physics. Indeed, colleague Jon Cartwright, reporter on physicsworld.com, was blogging from the control room at CERN on the big day.

Getting LHC to work is a massive achievement, but it’s only the start. With each experiment, the LHC will be generating a galactic quantity of data, and a someone has to provide the network to distribute the data to the LHC’s partner organisations for processing.

When I say it will be a huge quantity of data, consider this: one experiment alone requires 1,000 one-Gbit/s ports, necessitating rather a lot of new infrastructure. LHC researchers even had to design radiation resistant fibre to carry the data away from the experiments.

From CERN the data will be distributed to a series of Tier-1 computing nodes for subsequent further distribution and analysis, providing almost 7000 scientists in around 500 institutes and universities with data from the LHC experiments. National research and education networks (NREN) around the world are getting ready to take the strain, including Europe’s pan-European NREN GEANT2.

Some of the networking vendors to benefit include Force10 Networks, whose TeraScale E-series switch/router was selected to support the experiments themselves as well as CERN’s computing resources and networks across the Geneva campus.

In addition Ciena’s CoreDirector switches were selected by Caltech to support LHCnet, which interconnects the CERN laboratory with Tier-1 access points in Amsterdam, New York and Chicago, and provides onward connections to research facilities throughout the US, including the US Department of Energy (DOE)’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)’s Science Data Network, the Internet2 network and National Lambda Rail (NLR).

Yes, 10th September was a big day for physics, but it was also a big day for networking.

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If you’re interested in the physics going on at the LHC, then physicsworld.com has all the details:
LHC finally gets ready for action
LHC switchon: a preview
Mission complete for LHC team

For a lighter take on what it’s all about, check out this YouTube video from science writer Katherine McAlpine (Alpinekat):

Posted by Pauline Rigby on September 12, 2008 2:24 PM | Permalink