Ten frequently asked questions about Cern laboratory and Big
Bang theory
- What
is the Cern physics laboratory and what does it
do?
- When
was Cern set up, and what have been its
achievements?
- How
did Cern help to create the World Wide
Web?
- What
is Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle
accelerator?
- What
is the point of the Large Hadron
Collider?
- What
is Cern's Big Bang project?
- Cern's
Big Bang project uses grid computing to crunch the data, but how
big is the grid?
- What sort
of network does Cern use to share its data with the
world?
- What
are the database technologies that Cern is working
on?
- How
can other sectors, such as finance and banking, benefit from all
these technologies?
1. What is the Cern physics
laboratory and what does it do?
Cern, the
European
Organization for Nuclear Research, is a particle physics
laboratory based in Geneva, Switzerland.
A huge innovator and user of technology, the lab was designed
primarily to provide the particle accelerators and infrastructure
needed for high-energy physics research.
In total, Cern operates a network of six particle accelerators
and a decelerator.
Cern is funded by 20 European member states, and is currently
the workplace of 2600 full-time employees, as well as around 8,000
scientists and engineers.
2. When was Cern set up, and what
have been its achievements?
Founded in 1954,
Cern has a distinguished scientific pedigree. It has been home
to three
Nobel
laureates, and
it is the place where computer scientist
Tim
Berners-Lee
invented the
World Wide
Web in 1989.
The scientific achievements at Cern have been profound for the
scientific community, although the layperson may not recognise
their significance.
They include: the discovery of neutral currents in the
Gargamelle bubble chamber, in 1973; the 1983 discovery of
W and Z bosons;
and the determination of
the number of neutrino families, in 1989.
3. How did Cern help to create
the Web?
In 1980, while working at Cern, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a
program for storing
information using random associations, which he called
Enquire.
This formed the conceptual basis for
the global hypertext project which Berners-Lee proposed in
1989, to be known as the World Wide Web.
WorldWideWeb was also the name of the hypertext browser that
Berners-Lee created, along with the initial specifications of URIs,
HTTP and HTML.
4. What is Cern's Large Hadron
Collider (LHC) particle accelerator?
Cern is the home of the
Large
Hadron Collider (LHC), an enormous
particle accelerator that
smashes particles into each other at extremely high speeds.
As a result, the
scientists can learn insights into the
nature of matter and the universe itself.
The LHC has taken
six and a half years to build, at a cost of £4.75bn. Located
100 metres underground, in the region between the Geneva airport
and the nearby Jura mountains, the LCH uses a 27km long circular
tunnel.
5. What is the point of the Large
Hadron Collider?
The point of the collider is to monitor
collisions between particles, and gather and analyse the data
to learn about
the nature of matter.
From an IT perspective, Cern's major challenge has been to put
in place the technology to collect, store and analyse the data, and
share it with the world.
6. What is Cern's Big Bang
project?
As of August 2008, the world's biggest particle accelerator, the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will begin hurling
subatomic particles, called protons, around a 27km circular
tunnel running
beneath the
Swiss-French border, before crashing them into each other.
By recreating the universe's Big Bang, particle
physicists hope to learn more about the physical universe.
For example, scientists believe they will learn more about the
actual mass of particles, and about the nature of dark matter, and
whether there are 26 dimensions, or just 12.
The 'Big Bang' project is an international initiative that will
involve more than 2,000 physicists from 150 research institutions
in more than 30 countries.
7. Cern's Big Bang project uses
grid computing to crunch the data, but how big is the
grid?
The IT department at Cern is creating
the world's largest computing grid - known as the LHC Computing
Grid - for the Big Bang project.
The LHC Computing Grid (LCG) went live in June 2008, pooling the
processing power of around 100,000 CPUs worldwide.
It will process information at a rate of 1gbps, to cope with the
massive outpouring of data that will come from the LHC particle
accelerator.
8. What sort of network does Cern
use to share its data with the world?
As well as pioneering grid computing, Cern is also paving the
way for large-scale intercontinental networking with a
10Gigabit wide area network (WAN).
9. What are the database
technologies Cern is working on?
Cern has extended
database-clustering technology to enable a single database to
run across a number of distributed computers.
The LCG database deployment project has set up a worldwide
distributed
database infrastructure for the LHC.
It will do this using
a program called Oracle Streams to capture, filter and
synchronise data stores worldwide.
As well as working with Oracle,
IBM also worked with Cern to build a massive Linux-based storage
system supplying many terrabytes of disk storage.
10. How can other sectors, such
as finance and banking, benefit from all these
technologies?
Grid computing is already being used by Google and Amazon, as
well as banks like HSBC. It will have more applications in the
financial sector as processing demand grows, predicts analyst firm
Gartner.
Analysts have said financial firms will deal with gigabytes of
data per second within the next five years. So the sorts of grid
processing, networking and storage technologies that Cern is
pioneering will soon become relevant to many technology users.
Read more about the Cern laboratory: