O'Reilly Community

BROWSE: Most Recent | Popular Tags | Search:

Tags > physics

Rapping the Higgs Boson: Katherine McAlpine (aka AlpineKat) talks particle physics, the Large Hadron Collector, and Rapping at CERN

By James Turner
August 20, 2008

Katherine McAlpine spends her days putting together the online newsletter for the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. But at night, she dawns her white labcoat and geek bling, and becomes AlpineKat, rapping about the world of high energy particle physics. O'Reilly News spent some time talking to this multi-talented woman about what's going on at CERN, what we can expect from the LHC, why the Higgs Boson is important, and guerrilla filmmaking in the bowels of CERN.

Audio: Brian Cox Discusses the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

By Timothy M. O'Brien
August 14, 2008

Brian Cox talks about the scientific and technical challenges as well as some of the LHC-related computing efforts. Cox makes the case for the importance of continued commitment to pure scientific research calling the LHC the Earth's "first Apollo Mission of the 21st Century". He compares life as a rock star to life as a high-energy physicist, and debunks some of the FUD surrounding the possible creation of black holes. The Large Hadron Collider will collide up to 600 million protons every second, and it will produce 2 GB of data every 10 seconds requiring a globally distributed network of petabyte-scale storage and thousands of CPUs.

Large Hadron Collider as Massive Grid Computer

By Timothy M. O'Brien
August 14, 2008

What do you do when your scientific experiment (humanity's largest to date) produces about 2 GB every 10 seconds? Answer, you create a world-wide, distributed grid computing system with over one hundred nodes that involves Petabyte-scale storage and which measures computing resources in the MSI2K (Mega SpecINT 2000). In other words, it's a little more complex that keeping Twitter afloat under heavy load. This article explores the required infrastructure as well as some of the interesting (LGPL) open source software used to analyze high-energy physics data.

1 to 3 of 3