EAST LANSING, Mich. — When the Large Hadron Collider began gathering more data than anyone can imagine, much of it made a beeline to Michigan State University.
The LHC, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, is located at the European Centre for Nuclear Research, or CERN, as it is known by its French acronym. Straddling the border between France and Switzerland, the LHC went back into operation last week after a nearly yearlong hiatus due to technical issues.
Almost immediately, scientists began gathering data they hope will someday yield extraordinary discoveries about the nature of the universe. And that is where MSU comes in.
Located in the lower level of MSU’s Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building is a room filled with thousands of computers and servers that are helping to analyze much of the data that LHC is generating.
MSU is one of only a handful of such sites.
“The amount of data coming from these experiments is so enormous – like a fire hose – that no single site on earth can do the necessary processing,” said Raymond Brock, a professor of physics who recently returned from CERN where he has been working on an LHC experiment – A Toridal LHC Apparatus, or ATLAS. “So, the whole world participates.”
Initially, the raw data gathered from the massive ATLAS detector will be spread out equally among 10 national laboratories. These so-called “Tier 1 Computer Centers” are located throughout the world. In the United States, that facility is at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
Within each national region, additional tier 2 centers were established – five in the United States. MSU and the University of Michigan jointly make up the ATLAS Great Lakes –Tier 2 Center. They are linked together, to Chicago, and then to the LHC world by 750 miles of fiber optic cable known as the Michigan Lambda Rail.
“Ultimately,” Brock said, “our interest is what happened in the first picosecond after the beginning of the universe. Recreating little Big Bangs 40 million times a second pushes every technology – especially computing – to the limit.”
MSU has been a key player in the creation of the LHC’s ATLAS experiment. In addition to the MSU-based computing responsibilities, an MSU team led by physics and astronomy professor Joey Huston has had a significant role in designing, building and installing a 2,000-ton piece of equipment that measures the energies of the particles produced in high-energy collisions.
During the past 10 years as many as 30 MSU faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students have spent time at CERN. Currently five MSU postdocs and students live permanently in Switzerland and more than a dozen travel back and forth regularly.
More information on the CERN project is available at www.cern.ch.
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