CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3
home.cernhttps://www.nikhef.nl/en/news/final-run-for-the-current-lhc-... I wonder whether the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider was a net positive or negative for science. If it continued to completion, it would have had almost 3x the beam energy of even the upgraded LHC in 2030 (20TeV vs. 7TeV). But the questions are fundamentally political, not scientific: Would SSC operations and funding have continued through the US economic challenges of 2001, 2008, and 2020? I could see a timeline in which the SSC got built and discovered the Higgs boson before LHC came online, causing the LHC to be canceled, delayed, and/or starved of funding -- only for the SSC to be shuttered during the "great recession" of 2008 or during any other US Gov't belt tightening exercise. Today we would have neither the SSC nor the LHC. Or, perhaps SSC would have accelerated other discoveries by 10 to 15 years (SSC go-live was to be in the late-1990's versus LHC's Higgs discovery in 2012). I feel like the title is a little overdramatic. They’re not saying goodbye to the LHC, they’re upgrading it to have 10x the power. Probably because the upgrades to the collider are so significant that it will be called the HL-LHC afterwards. by Tim the Particle Man Taylor I've read that CERN is storing more than 1 exabyte of collisions data these days (up from 600PB during the last long shutdown https://information-technology.web.cern.ch/sites/default/fil...).
Not too shaby... All using ZFS, too No they're not. At CERN physics data is on: * CTA for tape storage: https://cta.docs.cern.ch/v5/ * EOS for disk storage: https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/eos-web/ There is a large CEPH cluster as well but that isn't really used for physics data. More specifically, from the EOS page: > Data is stored natively in XFS filesystems on hard disks or SSDs or on virtualised back-end storage (e.g. RADOS block devices) or distributed filesystems like Lustre or CephFS. uhoh, can only store 1000 of that dataset then. D: In one pool, sure. You can have more than one pool. The typo that sometimes got through in official literature still makes me giggle https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acern.ch+%22large+hard... Hopefully no sophons appear. You don’t want an ocular alarm clock? Hyperstrategic origami. El Psy Kongroo. Having done my little contribution to ATLAS TDAQ/HLT in the early 2000's, it is an interesting feeling to see the next steps taking shape. Too late, damage is already done. We have been on the wrong timeline for years at this point. I was surprised to see .cern as a TLD - i would not expect it to need a family of websites in the way .gov or .mil do. To be fair, if any org deserves a vanity TLD it's CERN It's a brand gTLD, like .microsoft and .google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain#Brand... bad timing with the price of RAM and NAND Maybe not that bad, stopping the accelerator means the storage requirements drop now that data is no longer being taken. Storage is instead just used for simulation and reprocessing which is small in comparision. So long as the market recovers before HL-LHC starts and the data volume increases it'll be okay. If it doesn't...