Milestone at the Large Hadron Collider: More than an Exabyte of Research Data
The vast majority of data collected at the LHC particle accelerator is automatically sorted out. Nevertheless, over an exabyte has now been archived.
Data center at CERN
(Image: Anthony Grossir/CERN)
At the world's largest particle accelerator, a total of more than one exabyte of research data has now been collected, most of which has been archived on 60,000 magnetic tapes. This was announced by the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN, which is responsible for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and it explained that more than half of this immense amount of data was collected in the past three years alone. At the same time, however, this represents only 10 percent of the data volume that will need to be stored and processed from the particle accelerator in 10 years. A major challenge therefore lies ahead. One exabyte corresponds to 1000 petabytes or one billion gigabytes.
The Large Hadron Collider is built in Geneva on the border between Switzerland and France in a ring-shaped tunnel. In the long tunnel, particles are shot at each other with immense energies, and the connected large-scale experiments ALICE, CMS, ATLAS, and LHCb then precisely analyze which particles are produced in these collisions. The enormous amount of measurement data generated is automatically drastically reduced by algorithms, so only a fraction is actually stored. To collect the first 500 petabytes of measurement data, the LHC therefore took another 12 years; the second half was then collected solely during the so-called third run, which began in 2022.
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The LHC is currently in its annual winter break; the third run is scheduled to be completed next year. After that, the facility is to be significantly upgraded, with the number of particle encounters per area and time to be tenfold in the so-called High-Luminosity LHC. This will also result in ten times as much measurement data remaining that needs to be stored, and the data center responsible for this has a lot of work ahead of it. Meanwhile, the existing data will remain secured for decades thanks to storage on magnetic tapes, CERN assures, and thus will also be available for future analyses.
(mho)
