60K computers to analyze data from collider
Published 8:10 pm Friday, September 12, 2008
The world’s biggest physics experiment, the Large Hadron particle collider that began running Wednesday in a 17-mile tunnel below the French-Swiss border, produces so much data that even the massive computing power at the European Organization for Nuclear Research can’t sift through it all.
So the Geneva-based lab, known by its old French acronym CERN, is sharing that burden among dozens of computing centers around the world. The result is the LHC Grid, a network of 60,000 computers that will analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other inside the collider.
Scientists will need the additional computing power to sift through the mountains of data produced when the colliders’ four giant detectors — 10 times more accurate than any previous instruments — measure activity at the subatomic level.
“You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with around 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second,” explains CERN’s Ian Bird, who leads the grid project.
Sophisticated filters discard all but the most interesting data, but that still leaves 15 petabytes to be analyzed each year — enough to fill 2 million DVDs. So it will get sent via high-speed lines to 11 top research institutions in Europe, North America and Asia, and from there to a wider network of 150 facilities where the information can be scrutinized by thousands of researchers — who could share in the glory of any discovery.
AOL moves to lure more visitors: AOL wants you to check your Gmail and see what your Facebook friends are up to — the company just prefers you do these things from its site.
In an effort to increase user loyalty and bring more visitors to AOL.com, AOL is taking a step in a new direction by adding outside content, including e-mail from rival providers such as Yahoo and Google and updates from social sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
The moves also reflect Internet users’ changing surfing habits and their reduced dependence on one-stop portals. Users are now apt to blend elements from multiple providers, including social networks and niche Web sites, and by providing easy access to those other services, AOL is hoping people will at least use its ad-supported site as a starting point.
On Wednesday, the Time Warner Inc. unit is rolling out the first round of changes, which includes the aggregation of e-mail previews in a manner similar to the site’s current AOL e-mail previews. Users will be able to click on previewed messages and go directly to their e-mail account, or click to open a window in which they can write a message.
Web inventor isn’t big on Internet Explorer: Tim Berners-Lee, the British-born inventor of the World Wide Web, says he doesn’t like to express preferences among Web browsers. But he does have an issue with one of them: Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer.
Berners-Lee, director of the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, said in an interview this week that Internet Explorer is falling behind other browsers in the way it handles an important graphics feature for Web pages.
A Web image that is encoded as a scalable vector graphic, or SVG, can be resized to fit the computer screen or zoomed into without becoming blocky and losing sharpness, as happens with images encoded as the more traditional “bitmaps.” Maps are one popular use of SVG.
From The Associated Press
