Tucked beneath the countryside on the outskirts of Geneva lies the world’s largest and most powerful particle-smashing machine: the Large Hadron

Inside CERN’s Exabyte Data Center

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2024-05-01 03:30:03

Tucked beneath the countryside on the outskirts of Geneva lies the world’s largest and most powerful particle-smashing machine: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the LHC probes the universe’s origins by recreating the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang. Housed in a 17-mile circular underground tunnel, the LHC accelerates protons and ions to near lights peed. The particles complete each turn at a mind-bending 11,000 times per second and spectacularly collide about 600 million times per second.

While the total collision energy is far from being enough to birth another universe, the fact that it is concentrated in the minuscule proton beams gives physicists clues into the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces governing our universe.

CERN’s computing infrastructure is as ambitious as its scientific endeavors. Subatomic particles are invisible to the naked eye. So, physicists must devise ways to detect, measure, and visualize the trillions of particles shooting out of each collision, some of which exist for a mere septillionth of a second (a decimal point followed by 22 zeroes).