LHC@home

News from PPARC

UK scientists at CCLRC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire recently joined computing centres around the world in a networking challenge that saw RAL transfer 60 million megabytes of data over a ten-day period. A home user with a 512 kilobit per second broadband connection would be waiting 30 years to complete a download of the same size. RAL is a member of the GridPP project - the UK effort by particle physicists to prepare for the massive data volumes expected from the next generation of particle physics experiments.

The exercise was designed to test the global computing infrastructure for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest particle physics experiment currently being built at CERN in Switzerland. To get ready for the LHC's unprecedented data rates, the worldwide collaboration is carrying out a series of "Service Challenges", the most recent of which (Service Challenge 2) has just been successfully completed. The eight labs involved sustained an average continuous data flow of 600 megabytes per second (MB/s) for 10 days from CERN. The total amount of data transmitted during this challenge (500 million megabytes) would take about 250 years to download using a typical 512 kilobit per second household broadband connection.
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Nice to see that the infrastructure can handle large amounts of data.

I'm probably dreaming, but I hope that this means that they *might* open the beta to a wider audience because of this..

:)

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