Thai floods derail Hadron-colliding antimatter boffinry
CERN experiment runs low on hard disks
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The world's hard drive shortage, caused by deadly flooding in Thailand, is holding back CERN's antimatter research, a top scientist at the boffinry nerve center said last night.
Analysis of figures spewing out of the Large Hadron Collider was compromised by a lack of storage space, said Peter Clarke, who works on the CERN LHCb experiment and is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Edinburgh.
Crunching the deluge of data coming out of the LHC experiment relies on a network of computers called the International Science Grid that stores, shares and processes the information.
Of the three key elements making up CERN's computing system, it's the storage that is holding scientists back.
"The processing power is not a limiting factor at the minute, we don't think the network will ever limit us," Clarke said during his Kelvin Lecture at the Institution of Engineering and Technology in London.
"But we're crying out for storage, and the floods in Thailand didn't help. It's compromising our experiment," he explained. "We have seven petabytes of storage and it's not enough."
The CERN experiment's hardware emits a raw flow of 50 million petabytes a year. The majority of that data is discarded, reducing the wedge to 15PB, and then split between computers on the International Science Grid.
The LHCb experiment, one of four major tests running at CERN, explores the nature of matter and antimatter in an attempt to explain why mass exists. ®
COMMENTS
Alternative data storage organisations
CERN & NSA -> All the data never gets seen again.
CERN & Google -> Google gets to index the raw structure of the universe - what could go wrong?
CERN & Amazon -> You now get recommendations from Amazon on what elementary particle other people have been using.
CERN & NASA -> the data gets translated into imperial format and then gets lost.
CERN & Mirosoft -> ooh where to start.. Microsoft offer to reformat the data, and from then on you need a succession of patches to read the data.
CERN & Apple -> The data gets formatted to make it look really pretty, but no-one else can read it.
hmm - who am I missing?
ttfn
Euroappeal
If they are really desparate I can probably round up 5Tb of unused disks here, and I bet other hobbyists across europe could as well. LVM could turn them into one big bit bucket.
If a pan european call to donate hardware went out, I'd box some stuff up and post it to them.
Re: Alternative data storage organisations
Well it'll only make sense to Australians, but:
CERN & NBN -> You collect and transfer all your data at blazing speed, but just when you're ready to start analysis the Liberal Party wins the election and Tony Abbott has all data deleted.
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