Higgs boson and Big Data

BANGALORE, INDIA: When on July 4, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that Higgs boson does exist, there was this another group, the big data analysts, who rejoiced as well.

Higgs boson is a critical element of the standard model of particle physics and is thought to be responsible for the characteristic of an object's mass. 

"Detection of the Higgs Boson would not have been possible without the last decade’s advances in processing big data. Joe Incandela, CMS Spokesman at CERN, explained that if every collision that they scanned was a sand grain, these sand grains would have filled up an Olympic sized pool over the last 2 years. They had to find the several dozen or so grains of sand that exhibited characteristics consistent with the Higgs Boson," notes Frank Stein, IBM Federal, Analytics Solution Center Director in a blog post.

The CERN teams, which developed the Large Hadron Collider (LHS), also developed a data strategy to deal with the data from the hundreds of millions of particle collisions occurring each second. 

"According to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director general at CERN, the computing power and network is a very important part of the research. Over 15 Petabytes (1 million Gigabytes) are stored each year. This is distributed through the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (WLCG) to each of 11 major Tier 1 centers around the world, and from there to research centers and individual scientists. In the U.S., the Open Science Grid, supported by NSF and DOE, provides much of the compute and storage power for this work," he adds.

Now if you thought the amount of data generated by LHC was huge, wait till the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope comes in because it is capable of generating 100’s of Petabytes of data per day, he adds.