* Posts by Dave Newbold

2 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2007

CERN: LHC to fire first proton-smash ray next month

Dave Newbold
Go

@Pete

> Does anyone know if I can visit CERN and see the boffins at work for myself

Yup.

http://outreach.web.cern.ch/outreach/en/Visits/Intro-en.html

Do drop in.

CERN BOFH needs a bigger storage array

Dave Newbold

Re: Never mind Higgs boson. What about basic arithmetic?

In fact, all data from the detectors is filtered in real time using custom silicon or FPGAs. Typically, only about one in every 400,000 measurements is kept, the rest just disappears off the end of FIFOs in buffers. For the detector I happen to know about, we record a few MB, 40M times per second; but only about 400MB/s make it onto tape.

Some of the FPGA-based systems used to process the data are quite impressive; few Tb/s flowing through a single electronics crate and being processed within a microsecond or so, that sort of level.