Spoilt’s blog

50,000 processor cores and counting.. about half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the LHC which will generate about 15 petabytes of data by colliding protons with protons. The Computer Centre will provide only about 20 percent of the processing power used to examine the LHC data, with the rest coming from the LHC Computing Grid, a dedicated network of more than 100,000 processors. The grid is linked to the centre through dedicated 10-gigabit-per-second connections. It can handle about 50,000 users at once, sharing out bandwidth and processing power between scientists. To store the huge amount of data the LHC produces, the centre owns 8 petabytes of hard disks and 18 petabytes of magnetic tapes. This will increase to 16 petabytes of hard disks and 30 petabytes of tapes by the end of the year. Check out the photos, enjoy!

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CPU capacity required at CERN =)

The four detectors of the LHC project.

CERN Computer Centre. PC Farms: Inexpensive mass market components (running Scientific Linux CERN - recompiled RHEL).

For more posters & photos, check out the CERN section @ my photo Gallery.

In a few hours I’ll be boarding on the airplane and flying to Geneva, Switzerland.. CERN here I come again! =) More to follow..

Today is my birthday - my 25th birthday. Thank you all for the happy bday greetings! It was a busy week… I didn’t get the chance to stop and rest a little bit yet.. I’ve been busy busy busy.. but what the hell… I will be going to CERN in Geneva from 3rd till 17th of Nov. =) CERN here I come again - actually it’s going to be my second time so I’m quite excited!

Short guide to install Flash player 10 on Fedora 9:

On 32-bit:

On 64-bit:

restart firefox and enjoy

tip: if you experience any problems with the sound, install alsa-plugins-pulseaudio, restart firefox and try again:

let me know how it goes…

Apple has patented the OS X Dock according to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/08/apple_patents_osx_dock/ … So what’s next? Is this the end of the Avant Window Navigator. kooldock and Cairo-dock???

Well, well, well… LHC switched on, world still here… Unfortunately for some no black holes were created and Satan didn’t use it as an inter-dimensional stargate to Earth. hahaha =) Therefore, if you’re reading this…the world hasn’t ended and unfortunately it’s not going to within the next 2-3 months. Why? LHC kaput…!

What is LHC@home?

LHC@home is a volunteer computing programme that enables you to contribute idle time on your computer to help physicists develop and exploit particle accelerators, such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Most of the scientific computing challenges that the LHC experiments are facing will require access to huge amounts of storage, the LHC will produce 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data per year. These data requirements mean that most analysis programmes cannot be run on individual PCs. This is why CERN is leading the development of Grid computing, which links hundreds of major computing centres around the world.

However, there are some exceptions where volunteer computing makes sense for the LHC. In particular, volunteer computing is good for tasks which need a lot of computing power but relatively little data transfer. In 2004, CERN’s IT Department became interested in evaluating the sort of technology (BOINC) that is used by volunteer computing projects like SETI@home. LHC@home became the overall title for these efforts;

This project uses BOINC. If you’re already running BOINC, select Attach to Project. If not, you will need to download BOINC (Fedora users: sudo yum install boinc-client boinc-manager).

So what are you waiting for? Join LHC@home now!!

Make sure you join the LHC@home Fedora Project Group.

Famous, famous LHC =p