Hadron Collider might cause IT revolution
Published 13 July, 2009, 09:13
Despite last year’s failure, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is still going ahead with its plans to recreate the Big Bang, and the technology alone designed for the experiment could revolutionize the world.
The largest scientific gadget in the world – the Hadron Collider, buried under the French-Swiss border near Geneva, involves 10,000 scientists from one hundred countries. The multi-billion euro project is a huge circular ring in which particles, traveling at almost the speed of light, collide.
This experiment could help scientists replicate the first moments after the Big Bang, supposed to be the beginning of time and matter. Consequently, the tests produce mammoth quantities of data to be analyzed. Some is assessed in the city of Dubna near Moscow.
The institute needs extremely powerful computers to process and store the information it receives. Indeed, the data churned out by the massive 27-kilometer circumference of the LHC is a bit more than the average PC could handle. Special technology is needed to meet the challenge, as the center’s chief system administrator Andrey Dolbilov explains:
“The equipment we use provides a high-speed internet connection of around 20 gigabytes per second, which is around 5,000 times more than your ordinary connection at home.”
Dubna’s joint institute for nuclear research is part of a high-speed international communications network called “Grid”. Some scientists say that the LHC Computing Grid could become as huge an IT breakthrough as the world-wide web was twenty years ago.
“We’re currently on the brink of a new era of technologies which may be called the world wide grid. The Hadron Collider is an example of how high-energy physics can act as a driver for IT-technologies as well,” said Vladimir Korenkov from Dubna’s information technologies lab.
The Collider was first successfully tested on September 10, 2008, but experiments were halted on the ninth day after a malfunction between two magnets accelerating the particles.
Despite the global economic crisis, the world-wide scientific team both in Switzerland and Russia is gearing up for another spin in October.
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