BCNETwork News

December 2007

The ATLAS Experiment: Understanding the Mysteries of the Universe with Advanced Networks and a Supercomputer

TRIUMF’s new supercomputer IBM System Cluster 1350 installed at TRIUMF, University of British Columbia

Canadian researchers are taking part in a large scale global physics experiment to uncover some of the great mysteries of the universe. ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), the biggest and most complex particle detector ever built could provide the answers to these mysteries. The first proton collisions are slated for the summer of 2008 at CERN’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator - a 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. Through these proton collisions, it is anticipated that the mystery of the Higgs particle will be discovered and the origin of mass will be understood.

At the main computing centre in CERN where the data is initially collected it is not possible to store and process all the data produced by the LHC. Instead, all the data produced by the LHC will be distributed to 10 Tier-1 sites located around the world and TRIUMF, UBC is the only Canadian Tier-1 site.

In mid-October, TRIUMF received a new addition, a new IBM System Cluster 1350 supercomputer. “With the addition of the new supercomputer to the Tier-1 site at TRIUMF, researchers will be able to overcome the challenge of processing and analyzing massive amounts of data on a global scale, while maintaining the TRIUMF Tier-1 centre as a Canadian leader in research on the global scene,” said Dr. Reda Tafirout, researcher at TRIUMF, UBC. The new supercomputer provides researchers with cutting edge technology that enables them to process over half a million DVDs worth of data in a one year period. If you stacked all these DVDs, they would be as tall as the CN Tower.

The supercomputer, combined with the dedicated 10 gigabit lightpaths of BCNET's recently upgraded advanced network provides researchers at TRIUMF with unprecedented bandwidth and storage capacity. This bandwidth also will enable researchers at TRIUMF to perform the high-performance grid computing necessary to run numerous analyses on the data transmitted from CERN. The data will be transmitted from CERN 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The recent expansion of the Tier-1 site makes TRIUMF one of the most powerful computing centres in Canada and it is playing an important role in the worldwide LHC Computing Grid.

As part of the ATLAS Experiment, the TIER -1 site at TRIUMF is responsible for providing five percent of the total resources required by the ATLAS Experiment and will be receiving approximately five terabytes of data daily, equivalent to 1050 DVDs.

Researchers around the world will soon be discovering the origin of mass and the nature of the universe with the help of advanced research networks and a supercomputer.