A Big Bang for grid computing

When scientists fire up the biggest physics experiment in history today, they will face a task that makes finding a needle in a haystack look simple.

Inside a 27km tunnel deep beneath the French-Swiss border they hope to detect evidence of extra dimensions, invisible "dark matter" and an elusive particle called the Higgs Boson. Success in this $10 billion (Dh36.73bn) endeavour would revolutionise our understanding of the universe.

But even the massive computing power at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research cannot sift through all the data that will pour in when its particle-smashing experiment begins. So the Geneva-based laboratory, known by its old French acronym CERN, devised a way of sharing the burden among dozens of leading computing centres around the world.

The result is the LHC Grid, a global network of 60,000 computers that will analyse what happens when protons are hurled at each other inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

"This is the next step after the web," says David Colling, a scientist at Britain's Imperial College, which is contributing to the Grid. "Except that unlike the web, you're sharing computing power and not files."

That computing power is needed if scientists are to find what they are looking for among the mountains of data produced when four giant detectors – 10 times more accurate than any previous instruments – begin measuring activity at the subatomic level.

"You can think of each experiment as a giant digital camera with about 150 million pixels taking snapshots 600 million times a second," explains CERN's Ian Bird, who leads the Grid project.

Sophisticated filters discard all but the most interesting data, still leaving some 15 petabytes to be analysed each year. That is enough to fill two million DVDs.

The data are sent via high-speed lines to 11 top research institutions in Europe, North America and Asia, and from there to a wider network of some 150 research facilities around the world where they can be scrutinised by thousands of researchers. "The experiment would not be possible without this infrastructure, that's why particle physicists have really driven the Grid," says Colling.

Building a new computer centre at CERN would have been impractical and costly, so scientists proposed a distributed network that makes use of each country's own research facilities, ensures they all have equal access and gives them a chance to share in the glory of any discovery.

Already the experience of collaborating on such a large computing project has proved invaluable, says Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid at Fermilab in Chicago. The US-government funded project is among the major contributors to the LHC Grid.

"We are doing things that are at the boundaries of science," says Pordes. "But the technologies, the methods and the results will be picked up by industry."

Scientists expect grid computing to become more widely used in future for research ranging from drugs to more effective nuclear power. Eventually, consumers will start seeing it used in daily life to regulated traffic, predict the weather or boost a flagging economy.

"In credit risk, the amount of money you can lend out is directly proportional to how many calculations you can do to quantify your risk," notes Colling.

So even if the LHC experiment does not yield answers to the cosmic questions posed by physicists, historians may one day see it as a key step in the development of networked computing.

It would not be the first time that has happened at CERN. In 1990 a young British researcher there created a computer-based system for sharing information with colleagues around the world. He called it the World Wide Web.

What is the big bang?

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will today begin an experiment to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang, which scientists believe gave birth to the universe.

Its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will seek to collide two beams of particles at close to the speed of light. Scientists plan to circulate a beam in one direction around the accelerator and later send beams both ways to cause collisions.

Following are some facts about the Big Bang and CERN's particle-smashing experiment:

RECREATING THE BIG BANG:

The final tests involved pumping a single bunch of energy particles from the project's accelerator into the 27-km beam pipe of the collider and steering them counter-clockwise around it for about 3km. The collider aims to simulate conditions milliseconds after the Big Bang, which created the universe about 13.7 billion years ago. The collisions, in which both particle clusters will be travelling at the speed of light, will be monitored on computers at CERN and laboratories around the world by scientists looking for, among other things, a particle that made life possible. The elusive particle, which has been dubbed the Higgs Boson after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who first postulated 50 years ago that it must exist, is thought to be the mysterious factor that holds matter together.

WHAT IS THE BIG BANG?

Recreating a Big Bang, which most scientists believe is the only explanation of an expanding universe, ought to show how stars and planets came together out of the primeval chaos that followed, the CERN team believes. Its essential feature is the emergence of the universe from a tiny speck about the size of a coin but in a state of extremely high temperature and density. The name Big Bang was coined in 1949 by British scientist Fred Hoyle to disparage a then emerging theory about origins that countered his own steady state view – that the universe had always existed and was evolving but not expanding. According to the Big-Bang model, the universe expanded rapidly from a highly compressed primordial state, which resulted in a significant decrease in density and temperature. Soon afterward, the dominance of matter over antimatter may have been established by processes that also predict proton decay. During this stage many types of elementary particles may have been present. After a few seconds, the universe cooled enough to allow the formation of certain nuclei. The theory predicts that definite amounts of hydrogen, helium and lithium were produced. Their abundances agree with what is observed today. About 1,000,000 years later the universe was sufficiently cool for atoms to form.

WHAT IS CERN?

CERN is one of the world's largest centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the universe is made of and how it works. Founded in 1954, the CERN Lab sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe's first joint ventures and now has 20 member states, plus six actively participant observers including the United States and Russia.

(Reuters/Britannica.com/CERN)

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.