Science Notebook

Following the successful circulation of first beam in the LHC on 10 September, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instrument is now on stand-by. A fault in one of its eight sectors is under investigation, and this requires the warming up the sector from a staggering -271 Celsius right up to room temperature. To achieve this will actually take several weeks, then the repair can be done and the whole sector cooled down again. By the time the repair is done it will be November and CERN’s entire research infrastructure, including all its particle accelerators and experiments, will be shut down for annual maintenance until spring 2009, which is when the LHC will most likely be able to restart, and all the exciting stuff will begin.

And in case you were wondering how the phenomenal amount of data generated by the LHC will be dealt with, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which involves more than 140 computer centres in 33 countries, will be managing and analysing more than 15 million Gigabytes of data every year, which will be produced from the hundreds of millions of subatomic collisions that will take place inside the LHC every second.

“The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid is a vital pillar of the LHC project,” said Jos Engelen, chief scientific officer for the LHC project. “It is an absolute necessity for analysis of the LHC data. It is the result of a ‘silent revolution’ in large scale computing over the last five years.”

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid relies on dedicated optical fibre networks to distribute data from CERN, to eleven major computer centres in Europe, North America and Asia. From these, data is dispatched to more than 140 centres around the world. Together, these distributed computers provide the power to manage the LHC’s data.