 Cross section of the 14 TeV ATLAS detector relying on the UW processor - Courtesy CERN
What good is a particle accelerator if you can't take pictures?
Come this April, CERN will get another weapon in the search
for the infamous Higgs-Boson particle. When particles collide in a
particle accelerator, the collision occurs so briefly that scientists can only
infer what takes place during the collision by analyzing the remaining
components left afterwards. Analyzing that data on the fly takes
a lot of calculations, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has just the
solution; a $6M USD grid array processor that can analyze a trillion bits per
second.
The "Regional Calorimeter Trigger" will have the most throughput of
any single application processor array to date when it is installed in CERN's
Large Hadron Collider this April. The project took almost a decade to
complete with dozens of test trials across various particle accelerations all
over the world.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
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