First beam in the LHC – Accelerating Science
The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometers of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 September 10. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery. (Read the full story on the Caltech website)
The LHC experiments are using a globally distributed “Tiered” grid of computational resources to process the proton collision data. This multi-Tier design was proposed and prototyped by Caltech in the late 90s, and is now universally adopted. The prototype cluster in the CACR machine room has been continually expanded and enhanced since then, and it is now one of the major Tier2 centres in the world, with over 1M SPECInt2k of compute power, several hundred Terabytes of storage space, and multiple 10 Gigabit network connections to other LHC sites in the US, and to CERN. First data from the initial LHC tests has already arrived for processing and analysis on the Caltech Tier2.
Local Press, featuring commentary and an interview with CACR Principal Computational Scientist Julian Bunn:
For further information on the Large Hadron Collider, see the CERN website.