Photos: The Cern computers cracking the Big Bang
Inside the IT hub that powers the Large Hadron Collider...
The Cern Computer Centre in Geneva, seen here, is the number-crunching hub that powers the physics research lab's quest to discover the nature of the universe.
A formidable 8,000 servers housing 40,000 Intel processor cores provide the grunt to help crack the petabytes of data spewed out from Cern's cutting-edge particle accelerators, based in Geneva, Switzerland.
About half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the 27km-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will generate about 15 petabytes of data by colliding protons with protons.
The computer centre will only provide about 20 per cent of the processing power used to examine the LHC data, with the rest coming from the LHC Computing Grid, a dedicated network of more than 100,000 processors.
Scientists hope the LHC will offer a "glimpse" at the Higgs Boson, a particle thought to give mass to the universe.
Photo credit: Cern
The LHC will produce up to 600 million particle collisions per second.
To store the huge amount of data the LHC produces, the centre houses eight petabytes of hard discs and 18 petabytes of magnetic tapes. This will increase to 16 petabytes of disc and 30 petabytes of tape by the end of the year.
Even this is insufficient to store the vast amounts of the raw data produced by the LHC so its four detectors - which each look for different particles and energy signatures - have built-in electronics and smaller computer centres that analyse petabytes of data per second they collect and throw away the bulk of the information not of interest to the physicists.
The data that's left is sent on to the computer centre and its racks of servers, seen here.
Jean Michel Jouanigot, head of network services at Cern, said: "A lot of processors are devoted to data processing for physics. We are collecting a tremendous amount of data from the collision points."
Photo credit: Cern
Once the data arrives at the centre it is immediately stored and reprocessed before being made available to 7,000 physicists in 33 countries via the LHC grid.
The LHC grid is linked to the centre through dedicated 10Gbps connections.
The grid can handle about 50,000 users at once, sharing out bandwidth and processing power between scientists. Its links across the globe are shown on this screen.
Jouanigot said: "The grid is a worldwide collaboration through many hundreds of sites and will get information through very powerful networks."
Photo credit: Cern
Data is stored on the tapes as soon as it comes to the computing centre.
Whenever one of scientists plugged into the LHC Computing Grid requests data, it is retrieved by a robot within the StorageTek vault as seen here.
The centre currently has four robots, each holding about 20,000 tapes, and it's planning to fit in two more.
Using existing tape technology the room would be full up within 10 years. However, Jouanigot said that the centre is constantly upgrading to tapes with higher data density, adding that each tape now stored about 750GB compared to about 200GB two years ago.
Photo credit: Cern
Cern serves as an internet exchange point and is one of the oldest in Europe.
Within the computing centre itself, the data exchange is handled by 1,500 10Gb ports, while information flow within Cern's various sites is handled by 70,000 1Gb ports, with some of the switching points seen here.
Photo credit: Cern
Here are computers that have been decommissioned from the computing centre.
Jouanigot said the centre refreshes its hardware about every three to four years.
All the hardware in the computing centre uses off-the-shelf components and the servers run a customised version of Linux Red Hat.
Photo credit: Nick Heath/silicon.com
Here is the Cern Control Centre (CCC), the room that controls the lab's eight particle accelerators.
It also looks after the cryogenic cooling and technical infrastructures of the accelerators.
Photo credit: Nick Heath/silicon.com
The LHC is fed with protons by a series of particle accelerators that increase the speed and energy of the particles.
The particles are then are fed into the LHC's 27km ring and accelerated to 99.9 per cent the speed of light.
Each beam that will collide in the LHC consists of up to 100 billion protons and the centre's 39 consoles allow operators to manage the beams' passage around the accelerators and monitor their cooling.
Here the patches of red on the screen in the top left indicate the cryogenic cooling system of the LHC - it must be cooled to just above absolute zero for the superconducting magnets that drive the beams to work - has been switched off.
The LHC is being returned to room temperature to allow repairs to be carried out on a fault and is expected to start again in April next year.
Photo credit: Nick Heath/silicon.com
This 27-metre-high wooden dome is used to host exhibitions at Cern and is the size of the cupola of St Peter's Basilica in Rome.
The Globe of Science and Innovation is made from five species of tree.
Photo credit: Nick Heath/silicon.com
A model of one of the superconducting dipole magnets used in the LHC.
Photo credit: Nick Heath/silicon.com