Physicists around the world are preparing for a series of experiments that could shed light on the beginning of the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator, is in the final stages of construction at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, on the border between France and Switzerland.
The accelerator has a circumference of 27 kilometers and is housed in an underground facility that straddles the Swiss/French border. Once completed, it will accelerate protons to near the speed of light, then ram them into one other.
"With high energy particle collisions, we can create massive particles we don't see in our everyday lives on this planet," said Ken Bloom, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
"What we're doing is essentially reproducing the conditions of the universe right after the Big Bang, when everything was really hot."
The data produced by the accelerator will be stored in databases all over the world, including a supercomputer called Red at UNL.
"(CERN) figured out they couldn't put enough computing power in one place - they couldn't cool it," said Carl Lundstedt, grid system administrator for Red. "There are some computers in Brazil, some in Taiwan and others scattered all over Europe."
Bloom and a team of other UNL chemists, physicists and computer scientists will help sort and analyze the accelerator data as soon as the machine is operational.
UNL is one of seven sites in the country that will store and study data. The data is distributed by Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., which currently owns the world's largest particle accelerator until the LHC is completed. Other databases for the project are at MIT and the California Institute of Technology.
"The amount of data you have to sift through to find things from this experiment is very unprecedented," said David Swanson, director of the Research Computing Facility where Red is housed. "(The accelerator) will produce on the order of 200 megabytes a second continuously once it goes on line. That's a gigabyte every few seconds."
Computer data is measured in increments called bytes - a 20-page paper is approximately 100 kilobytes. UNL is capable of storing 240 terrabytes of data from the accelerator, or 10 billion copies of that paper.
Although refereed to as a singular unit, Red is actually dozens of interconnected systems.
"Red's really about 120 computers and 300-some hard drives," Lundstedt said. "What we have here are standard computers - Dell, AMD, the same stuff that would be used for a Web server. It doesn't take highly specialized equipment, it just takes a lot of it."
"The LHC is using technology you have in your very own home," Bloom said. "The particle accelerator is essentially a large array of microwave ovens. The microwaves in your house has an electric field that is used to shift molecules in your food around. That's what makes food warmer.
"The LHC is using similar technology on a much larger scale - miles and miles of microwave ovens."
He added the accelerator is using energy levels seven times higher than any experiment ever done before.
"It makes me feel good that Nebraska's involved in something so visible, so global," Lundstedt said.
"We have highly skilled physicists and highly skilled computer scientists. When we applied to (work on the project), they said we were world class."
adamtempleton@dailynebraskan.com
