the difference is that it will be operated by people with iqs well above 100 who built the thing instead of by complete fools

Actually, I heard Harjun's dad bought it for him, making Harjun the principal operator of it.

Nevermind, it will soon be overclocked to over 9000 times the speed of light, and then all will be well.

my moped goes 9000 times the speed of light

Quote from niall09 :

please read this to get a better understanding of all of this http://forums.somethingawful.c ... read.php?threadid=2924802

That thread is amazing! I've been reading it for hours.

Just found this in that thread. Two very interesting webcams of the project.

already posted like 5 times and a thread

I still think it's funny and didn't read the other threads yet.

Quote from zeugnimod :

Just found this in that thread. Two very interesting webcams of the project.

lol

http://www.vimeo.com/893836
Watch this.

btw iirc the lhc has packets of protons circling the ring... is the idea to get a large number of simultaneous experiments when 2 packets collide or to get one large experiment with the combined energy of both packets?

Afaik, they're sending clouds of protons around the ring, forming two separate streams, one circling clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. For collisions they'll simply intersect the streams at certain points. But isn't that kind of a moot point when they'll have 30 million proton collisions per second?

Also the amount of data produced is massive

Quote from StarkingBarfish :

That may be the line from CERN, but not from individual experiments to the cern compute facility- even before the data leaves the detector cavern it is reduced by a very large amount using the triggers. We read out gigs of data from the detector 40 million times a second. This is then reduced down to several gigs of data a few thousand times a second by the level 0 trigger, and passed to the Higher level Trigger which reduces this rate further down to a few gigs tens of times a second. After this it is rapidly processed to reduce it further so that we can send it to local storage in the cavern itself, and after even more processing it eventually makes its way to CERN over 10Gb links. Once it gets there it is written to tape and slowly fed out to the grid storage elements for analysis.

The early data isn't likely to make it to CERN even as quickly as that- the LHCb estimates that it can store on its local systems a couple of days worth of data as buffer (I don't know the size of the array, but it must be huge). We'll be mostly relying on that for the early data as currently there isn't a fixed method of 'bookkeeping', writing the data to the cern tape farms in a documented manner. We'll have something worked out by then, but our storage requirements are still largely unknown for the early data.

depends on whether the cloud froms one gigantic proton with n*11tev colliding with another one for a pretty gigantic bang or if its really just a lot of 22tev collisions happening at the same time

I've not worked out if you're joking, but you can't have 'one gigantic proton'.