COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

Date	Mar. 5, 2010
Speaker	Ben Smith (Harvard University)
Topic	Computing at the Large Hadron Collider: Extracting physics from 40 million collisions a s
Abstract:	The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in Geneva, Switzerland, will begin high energy operation within the next few weeks. While the tens of petabytes of data which will be produced within the first year of running will provide a fertile testing ground for many physical theories, recording, distributing, and analyzing this data will prove to be a difficult computational science problem. This talk, designed for non-particle physicists, will provide an overview of the computational challenges faced by experiments at the LHC. In particular, I will focus on the Trigger - a hybrid hardware/software system designed to filter data in real time from a collision rate of 40 MHz to a write to tape rate of 200 Hz - and the Grid - a software system for distributing data and jobs to the roughly 20k compute nodes used for analysis of LHC data at institutions and universities around the world.

Acknowledgements

We thank the generous support of MIT IS&T, CSAIL, and the Department of Mathematics for their support of this series.