First Beam – LHC back online

One of the first proton proton collisions seen in the CMS Detector, displayed using the collaboration's software tool "Fireworks"

First beam circulated in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on 20 November 2009 – a clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o’clock that evening, followed by a circulating beam in the other direction a few hours later. When the proton beams are made collide at the centres of each of the four LHC experiments, the electronic data captured from the detectors will flow at rates ranging from a few hundred MBytes/sec to over one GByte/sec.

Global transport and analysis of this imminent stream of physics data is one of the major computing and networking challenges facing particle physics experiments. Leading edge explorations such as these require advances in all system components, from detectors to remote data analysis. CACR research staff have been involved with demonstrating technologies that reliably deliver over 100 Gb/s sustained from worldwide sources to a single analysis point. CACR also hosts a major “Tier2″ computing center, which is dedicated to receiving LHC datasets over twin 10Gbps networks from CERN, and running applications that analyse the events they contain.

• More Information on LHC First Physics here: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/)
• More information on High Energy Physics projects at CACR: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/main/?page_id=133)
• More CACR news items tagged “LHC”: http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/main/?tag=lhc)

CACR at SC09 in Portland

Visit us at Booth 2135!

At the 2009 Supercomputing (SC) Conference being held in Portland, Oregon November 14-20, CACR will be highlighting our research in computational biology, computing and networking for high-energy physics, data analysis for neutron scattering experiments, hypervelocity impact simulations, and time-domain astronomy. The SC Conference is the premier international conference for high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis.

Among the demonstrations at the CACR exhibit will be the Caltech entry in SC’s Bandwidth Challenge. The Bandwidth Challenge is an annual competition for leading-edge network applications developed by teams of researchers from around the globe. The Caltech entry for this year’s challenge is entitled Moving towards Terabit/sec Scientific Dataset Transfers: the LHC Challenge. This entry will demonstrate Storage to Storage physics dataset transfers of up to 100 Gbps sustained in one direction, and well above 100 Gbps in total bidirectionally, using a total of fifteen 10Gbps drops at the Caltech Booth.

Caltech’s PSAAP center will be represented in the NNSA exhibit as one of five centers of excellence focusing on predictive science. A talk entitled, “UQ Pipeline Ballistic Impact Simulations – Methods and Experiences”, will be given by Sharon Brunett in the NNSA exhibit (Booth 735) on Tuesday, November 17 at 5:15PM.