Team ITU@LHC's Official Blog

This blog's been lying dormant (very much like the LHC) since its initial beam-on last year. After the media frenzy surrounding the first successful tests on Beam On Day, the LHC has suffered setbacks and months of repairs to bring it back to operational status. Let's recap the timeline thus far:

2008...

• 10th of September, 2008: LHC's first beam on event (press release)
• 20th of September, 2008: "event" in sector 3-4 (press release)
• 21st of October, 2008: LHC officially inaugurated (press release)
• 3rd of October, 2008: LHC World Computing Grid officially crunches first data (press release)
• 16th of October, 2008: CERN releases official report on September incident (press release)

• 9th of February, 2009: CERN confirms the new restart date for the LHC (press release)

In Chamonix there was consensus among all the technical specialists that
the new schedule is tight but realistic.

“The schedule we have now is without a doubt the best for the LHC and for
the physicists waiting for data,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “It is
cautious, ensuring that all the necessary work is done on the LHC before we
start up, yet it allows physics research to begin this year.”

This new schedule represents a delay of six weeks with respect to the previous schedule, which foresaw the LHC “cold at the beginning of July”. The cause of this delay is due to several factors such as implementation of a new enhanced protection system for the busbar and magnet splices; installation of new pressure-relief valves to reduce the collateral damage in case of a repeat incident; application of more stringent safety constraints; and scheduling constraints associated with helium transfer and storage.

The enhanced protection system measures the electrical resistance in the cable joints (splices) and is much more sensitive than the system existing on 19 September.
The new pressure relief system has been designed in two phases. The first phase involves installation of relief valves on existing vacuum ports in the whole ring. Calculations have shown that in an incident similar to that of 19 September, the collateral damage would be minor with this first phase. The second phase involves adding additional relief valves on all the dipole magnets and would guarantee minor collateral damage (to the interconnects and super-insulation) in all worst cases over the life of the LHC.

The management has decided for 2009 to install the additional relief valves on four of the LHC’s eight sectors, at the same time as repairs in the sector damaged last September and other consolidation work already foreseen. The dipoles in the remaining four sectors will be equipped in 2010.

Engineers working on the LHC accelerator and magnets in Sector 3-4

Yes, it was inevitable. The 'real' LHC webcams.

Back to reality - as we all know by now, the initial LHC beam on was a success, with collisions to follow in due course after the final set of refinements are made to the machine. Then, hopefully, the data starts pouring in for the world to analyse!

To satiate your curiosity in the meantime, you could do some reading around the subject:

The CERN Large Hadron Collider: Accelerator and Experiments
http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/-page=extra.lhc/jinst

On the eve of the LHC: conceptual questions in high-energy physics
http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.4268


There's also lots (and I mean LOTS) of First Day media on the CERN site:

http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/collection/LHC%20First%20Beam%20Photos
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/collection/LHC%20First%20Beam

CERN's Central Document Server also has a growing archive of all LHC-related experiments at http://cdsweb.cern.ch/collection/LHC%20Experiments?ln=en, also including notes, papers and theses on the technology, concepts and experiments to be conducted. There's a video highlights package of the First Beam day on the LHC First Beam minisite (the direct link: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1125916).

For those who can't get enough of the video goodness, CERN also have a raft of video footage, B-roll and interviews with key members of the LHC project on their CDSWeb in the videos section, all streamable or downloadable. Check them out here.


And if you've not already installed BOINC, http://lhc.intotheunknown.co.uk/2008/09/lhc-and-us-going-into-unknown-together.html and joined the LHC@ITU team... Well, go do it!

Oh, and there's some real LHC webcams here and here - and while I'm at it, here's some more:

• ALICE
• ATLAS: Control Room
• ATLAS: Surface Halls
• More ATLAS cams

More goodies coming soon!

The BBC is giving massive amounts of coverage to a certain landmark event, and if you are in any doubt as to elements of the LHC or the project as a whole - fear not! The Beeb have published an exhaustingly comprehensive guide to the LHC, and you can check it out on the BBC News web site.

And don't forget, the beam on will be broadcast live on the CERN site tomorrow. Best get some sleep before the start!

In case you haven't heard, CERN is flicking the switch (as such) tomorrow morning (8:30pm UK time) on the Large Hadron Collider, marking the culmination of over twenty years' hard slog and amazing technological development.

One side-effect of all the particle smashing is the ongoing data collected and analysed by the experiment... and the sheer volume of it is astounding; an estimated 44,000 Gigabytes of data are expected to be generated each day (approximately 43 Terabytes), and approximately 15 Petabytes each year.

So, who analyses all this data? Obviously, no one organisation could possibly ever analyse all of this data. CERN has already established the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid;

The mission of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC.

The data from the LHC experiments will be distributed around the globe, according to a four-tiered model. A primary backup will be recorded on tape at CERN, the “Tier-0” centre of LCG. After initial processing, this data will be distributed to a series of Tier-1 centres, large computer centres with sufficient storage capacity and with round-the-clock support for the Grid.

The Tier-1 centres will make data available to Tier-2 centres, each consisting of one or several collaborating computing facilities, which can store sufficient data and provide adequate computing power for specific analysis tasks. Individual scientists will access these facilities through Tier-3 computing resources, which can consist of local clusters in a University Department or even individual PCs, and which may be allocated to LCG on a regular basis.

However, these academic institutions can't handle everything - even with similar arrangements worldwide. CERN realised this a fair while ago, and has partnered with Berkeley's Open Infrastructure for Networked Computing (BOINC), to create the LHC@home project. Just like other projects such as Folding@Home and SETI@Home, LHC@home will harness the combined power of millions of peoples' computers to process small chunks of data in one of the largest computing grids in the world.

The best thing? We can all be a part of it. All you need is a copy of the BOINC software installed on your computer; join the project (full instructions are available on the LHC@home Installation page, but there are only a couple of steps you need to perform) and then join the ITU@LHC team!