IPP Symposium

Harnessing the Data Tsunami at the Large Hadron Collider

Meenakshi Narain, Brown University Professor, Physics

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator, located at the CERN lab in Geneva Switzerland, creates collides particles at the rate of 40MHz. The LHC produces roughly 20 Petabytes of data each year. To efficiently record, store, distribute, analyze and archive the vast amount of scientific data poses a continuous challenge.

The pivotal discovery in 2012 of a Higgs Boson, the subatomic building block that gives mass to matter, required sifting through about 40 Petabytes of the data by approximately 6000 scientists. While this may be an esoteric event, it is a tribute to the distributed computing and data storage facilities at about 300 sites worldwide, utilizing data transfer rates around 100 Petabytes or more. The data capacity at the LHC is expected to grow to the Exabyte range, requiring new computing models which take advantage of the progress in server and network systems.

In this presentation, I will describe the current strategies deployed by the experimental collaborations at the LHC to manage, store and analyze the data collected in the last few years. I will also describe the current efforts, based on our gathered experience, to redesign the data management and computing model for the future, enabled by new technologies and tools, to meet the evolving experimental needs.

Narain's research interests are in experimental high energy physics and her ultimate goal is to illuminate the character of physics at the TeV energy scale. Meenakshi Narain has been involved with the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) and the DŘ experiment at Fermilab (Batavia, IL). She was instrumental in the discovery of the top quark in 1995, which is the heaviest fundamental particle and heavy as an Osmium atom. She continues her quest at the LHC to find the Higgs Boson and is excited about the vast new energy frontier that may enable us to make discoveries which revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

Prof. Meenakshi Narain received her PhD in physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She joined the Brown faculty in 2007 having previously taught at Boston University. She enjoys helping students and is continually exploring new ways of teaching physics to both graduate and undergraduate students.