The world's largest machine is reputed to be the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva and everything about it is big.
Designed to carry out high energy particle collisions, when completed next year, one of the collider's experiments includes a 10,000 ton detector.
The Birmingham-built Central Trigger Processor (CTP) is essentially the electronic brain of an experimental system dubbed ALICE. "It can receive up to 60 input signals from various sub-detectors and sensors every 25ns and make complex decisions in less than 100ns. The CTP decides if an interesting particle collision has taken place and tells the many sub-detectors whether to collect the data or not," said Dr David Evans of the University of Birmingham.
Head-on collisions of lead nuclei create sub-atomic sized fireballs with very high temperatures and densities, which recreate the conditions that existed less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.
"These ‘mini Big Bangs' will produce temperatures of over a trillion degrees, which is 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun, and neutrons and protons are expected to ‘melt' into a new state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma.," said Dr Evans.
"By studying this we hope to learn more about the force that holds atomic nuclei together (the strong force), the origin of the mass of nuclear matter and much, much more," said Dr Evans.
Everything about this experiment is on a truly gigantic scale. During collisions of lead nuclei, ALICE will record data to disk at a rate of 1.2GByte every second and will write over 2PetaByte of data to disk every year. That's equivalent to more than three million CDs (or a stack of CDs (without boxes) three miles high). To process these data, ALICE will need about 50,000 top-of-the-range PCs, from all over the world, running 24 hours a day.