• Question: In what ways have developments in computing affected your work?

    Asked by anon-8076 to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 15 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Computing is absolutely crucial to my work. Previously back in the 1950’s and ‘60s, particle accelerators were designed more-or-less on paper, with physicists having to calculate everything by hand. That meant that the machines had to be fairly simple in order to get the maths to work out.

      Now, though, we spend a lot of time optimizing the machines on computers before they get anywhere near being built. This saves you a lot of time ‘fixing’ the real machine and is (almost) a guarantee that your machine will work when you switch it on. Usually it takes a while before you fully understand how it works, but computer simulations can really help with that.

      You can do amazing things with computer simulations, from designing each bit of the machine, seeing whether or not the machine behaves like you expect, checking how it will respond to errors (if, for example, a magnet gets put in the wrong spot) and even testing your simulations against existing accelerators to check that you’ve got the physics right. There are some things you can do with the simulations that you can’t even do with a real machine!

      We do incredibly complex things with accelerators nowdays – as in the case of the LHC, and it takes a lot of computing power to follow the tiny subatomic particles through such a big machine, so we often end up using huge ‘clusters’ of computers instead. These are big groups of computers, which are each given a small part of the problem to solve. Each computer does their small bit at the same time so the whole problem is solved more quickly!

      As part of the LHC project the “Grid” was invented – which is like a global computer cluster, so that the particle physicists will have enough disk space and computing power to store and process all the information that comes out of the LHC. I use the Grid for some of my simulations too!

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Wow I couldn’t do what I do without computers. We get sent data from SATURN every single day because of computers. All the data analysis I do is using computers. I collaborate with scientists all over the world using the internet and email and Skype. Without these advanced technologies I really couldn’t do what I do!
      OK, well I could still study Saturn, but I’d have to do it the old fashioned way, and it would be harder to work with scientists in other countries and I’d have to do all the maths myself instead of the computer doing it for me, no thanks! 😉

    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      With higher performance computers has come the ability to handle more data much quicker. In some of my experiments I have radiactive beams firing a billion particles a second in the beamline, and thousands of events being detected by various detector systems. Higher speed proccessors have allowed me to record more particle detections, and so I can make better calculation. We have huge arrays (Terabytes of memory now) to record massive amounts of data, so we can record lots of different things like particle energies, sizes, the times they were detected and so on. Great question!

    • Photo: Robert Simpson

      Robert Simpson answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Computing has a had an enormous effect on physics. These days physics researchers would do well to have some computer science training as well. In my own area of citizen science we use the internet to collect data from hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Check out http://www.milkywayproject.org or http://www.galaxyzoo.org to see what I mean.

    • Photo: Geoff McBride

      Geoff McBride answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Not much at all but I will be using a super computer as part of my new research [see my profile]

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