Blogs from WikiToLearn

Bells and whistles from the WikiToLearn Community

To the bat-cavern!

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It’s incredible how every day here at CERN during WikiToLearn Sprint is full of surprises and exciting activities!

This time I’m talking in particular about the visit to the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment in the LHC establishment. When entering the site we were welcomed by Prof. Pietro Govoni and then we were introduced to the quantum physics involved in LHC experiments, a nice talk hosted by Prof. Marco Paganoni.

We were then divided in three groups of about 10 people and I was in the one guided by Prof. Govoni, who started by showing some technical features of the experiment, such as the structure of the LHC at a hardware level and the actual way in which the scientists have managed to make the protons collide: that is, protons are sent in packets 70-ish cm long and 10m apart one from another, first sent in a linear accelerator and when they reach a minimum energy they pass on to the synchrotron and then similarly to the supersynchrotron. Eventually they reach the LHC and start colliding, about ten to the ninth times every second!

Of course there’s a series of devices that manage to reduce the amount of data taken, otherwise it would be overwelming: a first level hardware trigger and two levels of software eventually bring those numbers down to 100 phenomena acquired by the machines.

After a tour of the experiment’s control room, in which we saw some Plasma software featured, we ventured down to the pit… and the magic happened! I was curiously amused by some apparently odd safety procedures while going underground 100 m, but still I couldn’t care more: I was inside the cavern of LHC!

Is that place huge indeed! Inside of the cave we were shown the immense CMS detector and its many layers for the detection of different particles and different energies. Even if there are cables and wires everywhere going up and down the place, they aren’t distributed in a chaotic way: in fact, even the length of two different cables has to be almost identical, otherwise it could prove in a loss of performance and a worse data quality.

Of course during all the experience there were many occasions to show our happiness and excitement to be there, and you can see some result of that down here! Till the next time,

Farewell!

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That’s over 200 Petabytes!

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Today, on the third day of the WikiToLearn Sprint at CERN hosted by KDE e.V., we had the pleasure of listening to an interesting and inspiring lecture by Professor Pere Mato Villa, who talked about Computing for Data Processing and Analysis at CERN. In approximately one hour, we were enlightened on the techniques and methods in use in the various LHC experiments to acquire and process raw data from detectors. He also explained the massive extent of the IT infrastructure that’s needed to host all the data: currently all the LHC experiments rely on distributed computing resources, accounting for roughly 350,000 CPU cores, and 400 PB of disk and tape storage combined. That’s a huge one!

Together with the hardware goes the software: in 1995 the ROOT project started and it has since then helped many scientists in speeding up their workflow. Another cool software that he discussed was Geant4, a toolkit for the passage of particles through matter.

Eventually, he prospected the new challenges that LHC experiments will face: mainly going Big Science on the Cloud, since cloud resources will follow the evolution of bare-metal ones, and adjusting the software to these changes.

I am personally astonished as I learn more and more about the great efforts and the fantastic results that are achieved here at CERN, and I sincerely hope that we’ll be looking in future at more and more people willing to make a difference for science.

An unearthly child: my WikiToLearn welcoming experience

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Hello there,

My name is Vincenzo Eduardo Padulano, I’m a student in physics at Milano-Bicocca University. All my life I’ve been curious about the universe, the unexplored and the unknown. Above all, my interest was in finding new ways of improving our species’ adaptive skills against what is yet to come, and there’s no better way than uniting  our efforts against it. No wonder then, that when I was contacted by Riccardo Iaconelli in late September 2015, I swiftly join the project WikiToLearn.

Wikiwhat?

Briefly, WikiToLearn is a website that aims to create an online library where everybody in the world should be able to acquire every kind of knowledge, and help to improve the existing one. in fact, the motto of the project is “knowledge only grows when shared”: this means that not only everyone can learn from the content of the site, but furthermore everybody is crucial to its upgrading!

What I did for it

So that’s how it went: I had a collegue of mine who was already working inside the project and asked me to join them, I accepted the invitation and as soon as I got in contact with the rest of “the crew”, I felt like at home. You can’t imagine how good it can feel not only doing the things that you like, but with such enjoyable people like the ones inside this project!

My first steps were mainly taking some time to learn the structure of the website and the basics of LaTex, a simple way to write mathematical symbols and functions. In a couple days I was already at full speed, writing pages and pages of content, mainly mathematics, but still it was fun and I felt appreciated for my work.

How it surprised me

As time went by, I saw  more and more people joining our team, I can’t keep the numbers but I can feel the difference between September and now! And with Riccardo going from town to town spreading the project and receiving contacts and affiliations from different organisations, it was really clear that this project was just gonna keep growing.

And so it was! In fact in less than two weeks we are going to be hosted by CERN and sponsored by KDE e.V., that kindly offered us the possibility to develop our project in an advanced enviroment where most of the staff will be able to work in close contact. This is truly a great opportunity that I couldn’t see coming, but that was more than appreciated!

Expectations

Indeed I ventured on a journey that both inspires and challenges me, an Unearthly one you might say. I invite everybody to do like me, at least to try it, to be aware of the power that we have as humans when we stick together and to do everything possible to achieve this power

Thanks again to KDE e.V., CERN, and University of Milano-Bicocca.

CERN Sprint 2016 – WikiToLearn