CERN, the Big Bang and Impact On the IT Industry 169
whencanistop writes "ComputerWeekly have put together a nice short guide (with lots of links) of what is going on at CERN. They've got a nice slant though on what this big bang experiment is going to mean for the IT Industry. Interesting slant on the world's largest grid and the database clustering technology that they are using. They have also picked up on the amusing rap video by CERN's scientists that has been wandering around YouTube."
Best source for evil scientist news (Score:5, Informative)
Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe [theregister.co.uk]
Boffinry bitchslap brouhaha: Higgs and Hawking head to head [theregister.co.uk].
...and they also answer important questions, like So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum? Plus, the size of Wales in cubic furlongs [theregister.co.uk]
...anyway, getting back on topic, they also tell us, in Today is not Hadron Collider Day [theregister.co.uk],
"Only a year or more from now will the colliding protons be disintegrated with sufficient violence to produce the various treats we have been promised. Strangely perhaps, by then it seems a racing cert that the broadcasters will all have gone home, and the scribblers will mostly have ceased to file copy. Once the insane laughs begin to truly ring out in the LHC's underground caverns, once the mad scientists wipe the foam from their lips, roll up their sleeves, lock and load their outrageous particle guns and really start to show what they can do, the chances are that nobody will be watching.
"But there will be at least one exception. The Reg hereby pledges to stay on the story, bringing you all the humonguous subterranean cavern magno-doughnut beam cannon news hot off the wires - perhaps with a garnish of hysterical rip-in-the-very-fabric-of-spacetime dimension portal angle here and there. As long as there's a universe to report from, we will continue to follow the Quest for the Big Answers (TM)"
Re:What it means to IT. (Score:3, Informative)
Er, yes there is - goddamn gigafirehoses of data coming out the damn thing and all needing to be saved for later scrutiny.
Re:Sys Admin at CERN (Score:5, Informative)
I concur...where I work our 5 man unix team supports about 400 engineers of various types (mechanical, electrical, computer scientists, aerospace, etc.) and they are a needy little bunch.
never want to follow the processes, always want it now, refuse to let us do any IT analysis of their computing needs, refuse to use the ticketing system.
Frustrating to say the least.
Another place I worked one of the VMS computer operators told me a story where she was fixing a problem for a scientist and paused for a few seconds to review what she was doing in her mind before typing in a command..the scientist looked her in the eye and told her "you just wasted 13 seconds of my time." Her response was she would have wasted his entire day if her command had taken down the cluster...