Blogs from WikiToLearn

Bells and whistles from the WikiToLearn Community

Wiki, what’s going on?

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It’s been two weeks since we are back from the Sprint @CERN: we came back with lot of work done but much more to be done, that’s why I’ve decided to post something about our post-Sprint activity up to now.

These weeks have been full of important work for us and since I’m part of the editor team let me tell you two words about what we are working on.

We are focusing very much on organizational aspects such as the introduction of new users, our internal structure, solving some bugs related on how math is rendered in some browsers and the conversion from tex (or any other format) to mediawiki. According to me our strength is the fact that we are a young – and extremely willing – community: all these points are very important to us, since we understand that the future of the community is based on them and that’s why we are trying to do our best to deepen these aspects and not to leave anything to chance.

One of the things that I really appreciate is the attention we are paying to new users: we really care about them! We though about the idea of creating the role of “tutors” (i.e. more experienced users) to help newcomers, because we want everybody to be perfectly introduced in the community and to feel free to ask for any doubt. Moreover we’ve also decided to make editing experience even more user friendly than it is by using buttons and interactive tools on the personal userpage and on the editor environment. More precisely: new users are really important to us and we care about them, that’s why this point has been so fundamental in these weeks.

We are working, we are growing and the best is yet to come: #operation1000 is coming! 😀

Bye,

Matteo

CERN Sprint 2016

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WikiToLearn Community

WikiToLearn, KDE VDG and KDE Plasma Desktop team at IdeaSquare

 

“together we stand, divided we fall” were singing the Pink Floyd in Hey You.

We, humans, have always tried to improve our skills and our knowledge, in order to live a better life.
The creation of communities have helped us archieving huge progresses in every field.

WikiToLearn is an open-source community and everyone is free to join and play an active role in it.
We think that working together, sharing ideas and socialize are essential for communities, that’s why last week we have been at CERN for our first sprint of 2016!
We have been there thanks to KDE eV and professor Marco Paganoni.

We have worked a lot on WikiToLearn, we have visited CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), but first of all we had a lot of fun learning from each other!
This is great because we didn’t just believe in WikiToLearn motto “Knowledge Only Grows If Shared”, but we proved that it works!

I want to thank you all, even from Riccardo, Luca and Irene, for being there and for being such an awesome community!

 

Davide Maggiorelli

P.s. I also want to thank pipsin personally for her great advices!

To the bat-cavern!

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photo_2016-03-12_11-24-54

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!

img_kde_CMS

 

 

That’s over 200 Petabytes!

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Pere_Mato_Villa_lecture

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.

How much is 1 TeV?

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We are about half way trough this WTL Sprint @CERN, so I’ve decided to post something about my experience. Actually in this post I do not want to talk about our work, probably I’ll dedicate another article to it at the end of this week, but about one of the talks we had the opportunity to listen. On monday Ezio Todesco (CERN) gave us a talk about CERN history and magnets in LHC.

CERN, as an European organization, collects funds by each country involved, according to its gross national product. This is extremely important for scientific research since it is based on external funds: money do not rule the word, as they say, anyway it’s important that this is such a large scale project since without funds research would not keep going on. The fact that CERN was founded in 1954, immediately after WWII, as a centre for the nuclear research is a sign of the important feeling of founder states to change what had happened and the way science was used: this date can be seen as a turning point in science history.

The second part of the talk was dedicated to magnets in LHC. Why do we need magnets? Simplifying: to bend elementary particles trajectories in their run around the circle. Actually here I do not want to give a lesson about HEP or CERN’s instruments so let me sum up some important concepts: particles are accelerated and pushed to relativistic velocities, this has a direct consequence on magnets power since it has to be increased in order to avoid particles to follow linear trajectories; magnets in LHC are kept at extremely low temperatures (~2K) in order to allow superconductivity to take place. Last but not least we wonder to know which energy particles are pushed to. Since LHC run 2 took place in 2015, physicists are able to push particles up to energies of the oder of magnitude of the Tera electronvolt (1TeV).

How much is 1TeV? I mean, is it a huge energy or not? Actually it corresponds to the energy of a mosquito flying around, so it’s an extremely low value of energy. Clearly this comparison is purely meaningless, since here we are looking at a microscopic property (particles energy) with our macroscopic interpretation of the world, but it was a funny way to conclude this post 🙂

Thak you,

M.B.