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Posts Tagged ‘CHIPP’

Videos: The Physics and Experiments at the LHC

Friday, June 11th, 2010

CSCS is operating an HPC system for the Swiss Institute of Particle Physics (CHIPP), which is used to analyze the data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN.

CSCS asked CHIPP to organize an internal one day workshop to present the physics, the experiments and the accelerator at the LHC as well. The morning session was mostly dedicated to a general introduction of the LHC experiment and particle physics. The afternoon session was dedicated to a description of the experiments (CMS, ATLA, LHCb) that are relevant for CSCS.

CSCS has been impressed by the presentations given by CHIPP collaborators. In a very clear way they introduced us to the world of particle physics and of modern colliders and detectors. We are very happy and honored to be able to share with you the recordings of the presentations. They give us an insight in one of the most challenging experiments ever done on Earth, with the largest instrument created on this planet.

We start by publishing the first three introductory presentations of the morning that give an impressive overview on LHC and particle physics. You have in any case to have a look to the first presentation of Prof. Christoph Grab (ETH Zurich) introducing us in the world of particle physics. Then Szymon Gadomski (University of Geneva) explains the LHC experiments and their properties. Finally Michele Weber (Laboratorium für Hochenergiephysik-Universitaet Bern) explains what accelerators are and how they work.

To view the presentations you need Quicktime. Just click on the picture or follow the link underneath for download options (e.g. for you iPhone).

Particle Physics at LHC – an overview

Christophorus Grab (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule Zurich/ETH (ETH))

  1. The Standard Model of particle physics (SM)
  2. The LHC physics program
  3. Why do we want it
  4. What do we want and hope to measure
  5. Why does it take some time to do this

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CHIPP Phoenix Phase C Now Fully Operational

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

CSCS is happy to announce that the Phase C of the Phoenix cluster of CHIPP has being put fully operational this Tuesday. At the same time Phase B has been switched off and is being decommissioned.

The cluster Phoenix is being used to analyze as Tier 2 the data being produced by the LHC experiment at CERN in Geneva. The old compute nodes will be transferred to Swiss universities and used in Tier 3 environments.

We wish the researchers of CHIPP and Cern gut luck in the search of new subatomic particles.

In the next pictures you see the Phoenix sysadmins dismantling the old hardware.

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Installation of the Phoenix Upgrade for CHIPP

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

In January 2010 started at CSCS the upgrade of the cluster “Phoenix” that is being used as tier 2 by the Swiss Institute of Particle Physics (CHIPP) in the LHC experiment at CERN.  The Swiss commitment in 3 of the 4 large LHC experiments (ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) mandates establishing their own Grid computing infrastructure for performing LHC physics data analysis in Switzerland.

The previous system based on SunBlade 8000 for the Compute Notes, SF_X4200 M2 machines with 2.8 GHz AMD processors for the Service Nodes and SF_X4500 for the Storage Nodes with our ZFS-Solaris Technology has been running now for 3 years and an upgrade and expansion was necessary.

The new HPC system is based on a Gigabit Ethernet network and an additional Infiniband network based on QDR technology with the Sun Datacenter Infiniband Switch 648 and uses Lustre as parallel file system. The worker nodes are base on Sun X6275 blade server, based on the new Intel X5500 processor generation (Nehalem, 2.53 GHz, Quad-Core, 8MBCache).

The hardware has been delivered beginning January, 2010 and will be functional in March, 2010. The old compute nodes will be decomissioned by mid year.

In the next picture you can follow the assembling of the system in the first month.

The truck delivering the hardware beginning of January at a sunny day in Manno.

The boxes with the delivered hardware in the CSCS computing room.

Unloading of the racks that can up to 1’080 kg heavy.

Christoph Grab (CHIPP)  inspects the location of the upgrade of Phoenix (which is next to the existing system).

The first QDR InfiniBand cables (in blue) are connected to the IB fabric. Because they are very fragile, the cables are suspended to the deck and not running in the raised floor.

The sysadmins of Phoenix Jason and Fotis are getting ready to take over the new system.