Fermilab joins worldwide computer network
Imagine trying to figure something out, be it the fundamental nature of the universe or how bird flu mutates. You need to perform and analyze thousands, of equations or simulations - so many that it would take 16 million CD-ROM disks to back it up.
On Friday Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia joined an international computer grid network that will help scientists worldwide do their jobs, especially those studying physics in experiments at the new Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory in Europe.
The theory is simple: Universities and research institutions often have pockets of downtime on their supercomputers. Why not let somebody else use them, too?
Fermi already belongs to the Open Science Grid, which connects United States laboratories and universities. Now, it will help out the Large Hadron Collider which started up in September and it will help Fermi through the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. Fermilab is one of more than 140 computer centers from 33 countries that will analyze and manage more than 15 million gigabytes of data each year from the LHC.
It works in reverse, too: A researcher can submit a request to run a project to her local computing center which submits it to a Tier 1 facility such as Fermilab. It is then submitted to a computer at the Large Hadron Collider, which determines what computers worldwide have the capacity to run the project at that time. And it's not just for physicists.
Andrew Schultz, a State University of New York- Buffalo researcher studying the nature of gas molecules, spoke Friday about the speed with which he has been able to do his work since starting to use the Open Science Grid through Fermi in January. "It's the ideal workhorse to perform our calculations ... it's beyond an order of magnitude we could access on our own," he said of grid networking.
On Friday, a flashing digital map showed stacks of projects awaiting space and how they were being distributed. .
When the Large Hadron Collider was first proposed nearly 20 years ago, it was thought that the scientists could load the data onto magnetic tapes and fly them to the United States and other countries for scientists to analyze on their computers, and back up. More than 500 scientists from the United States are involved in studies at the Hadron.
Computer science experts realized that would be burdensome and slow. Grid networking was coming online, and so they designed the Large Hadron Collider with that in mind. Grid networking, mostly over dedicated fiber-optic lines, should also save money, as scientists can stay in their home countries rather than going to labs and labs don't have to build as many computers.
Fermilab alone has 3,000 machines, and tape storage capacity of 20 petabytes.
"The grid was invented just in time to let us exploit the (LHC) data in just this way," Fermilab director Pier Oddone said.