You may have heard that yesterday, Sept. 10, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) flipped the switch on its Large
Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle
accelerator. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions
just after the Big Bang, by colliding two beams of subatomic particles
head-on, at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world
will then analyze the particles created in the collision to gain a
better understanding of some of the fundamental laws of nature. (For an
alternative description, check out the Large Hadron Rap.)
What does all this require? Storage. Massive amounts of storage. Enough
power and storage to handle 15 Petabytes per year, making the data
available to thousands of physicists for analysis. CERN needs to store
all the raw data, and also turn the raw data into something physicists
can use -- and store that too. Reliable storage is a critical factor
for successful LHC experiments.
To help them handle this massive amount of storage, CERN is utilizing
Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library systems and Sun StorageTek T10000
tape drives. In addition, the installation was greatly simplified with the use of Sun's Customer Ready program.
Some other interesting LHC factoids:
- There is 10 times more atmosphere on the moon than there will be in
the LHC.
- With an operating temperature of about ‐271 degrees Celsius, just 1.9
degrees above absolute zero, the LHC is colder than outer space.
- When two beams of protons collide in the LHC, they will generate
temperatures 1000 million times hotter than the heart of the sun, but
in a minuscule space.