The large Hadron Collider is one of the most amazing inventions of mankind, responsible for the discovery of numerous subatomic particles, including the elusive Higgs boson. And recently, new data hint at new discoveries beyond the Standard model. And it is very surprising, because, according to the scientists, we can uncover less than 1% of the data from the accelerator. Therefore, open TANK can be called “lucky”. Or is it not?
Physicists use for 26.7 km-long LHC to accelerate particles to almost the speed of light, and then push them to see if they can find something new. These particles collide with incredible speed, which leads to the insane amount of data. On its web site, CERN notes that one billion collisions per second generates 1 petabyte of data. And it’s a problem because to keep (not to mention the analysis) that data is extremely difficult.
“If we wanted to keep all 30 million events per second, we would need about 2000 petabytes to store a typical 12-hour work cycle. In the year of the TANK running 150 days, which means we will have almost 400,000 petabytes (400 exabytes) for the year. This amount of information physically impossible to keep.”- said in an interview with ScienceAlert physicist, CERN Andreas Hecker. “it is worth mentioning about the processing of data. CPU power is just not enough. We will not be able to process data as fast as they do.”
Thus, it was necessary to make a decision about which fall into the vault, and which are not. 30 out of every million collisions recorded only 1200. It is only 0,004% of the total data and the remaining greater than 99.996% is lost forever. It sounds pretty scary, when you consider that we might have missed.
“But don’t panic. Most known processes are quite rare. For example, the appearance of the Higgs boson is a very rare process. When the maximum intensity of the collision TANK, we produce approximately 1 Higgs boson per second. Other interesting physical processes are less rare, but we use triggers, fast online algorithms that are based on special hardware and software to select interesting events from the most less interesting.”
Thus, in order not to miss something interesting, scientists propose to build new detectors for the Large Hadron Collider. Then the question of data storage and decrypt them without the fear of losing something important would disappear.
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