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)