Items tagged with CERN
Everyone has birthdays and anniversaries, but not everyone considers them to be that significant. However, an occasion that is hard to argue as being anything but notable is the anniversary of the first webpage going live on the World Wide Web (remember when we used to call it that?). This weekend marks the 25th year for the first publicly-accessible webpage. To say we've come a long way since that day on August 6th, 1991 would be an incredible understatement. By the mid-90s, many school computer labs began to gain internet access, and at around the same time, or not long after, home users began picking it up, too. Since then, we've moved away from our phone lines and into our broadband connections....
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a modern engineering marvel of great importance to the scientific community. The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and it has been beset with obstacles over the course of is construction and during its operational history. Back in 2009, the LHC was damaged when a passing bird dive bombed a piece of bread onto a substation that was used to power the particle collider’s cryogenic systems. Fast forward to this week and yet another animal has knocked the LHC offline, but this time it was a ground assault instead of an attack from above. Amazingly, a weasel managed to chew on a 66-kilovolt electrical transformer cable and needless to say, the...
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AMD is long overdue for a major architecture update, though one is coming later this year. Featuring the codename "Zen," AMD's already provided a few details, such as that it will be built using a 14nm FinFET process technology and will have high core counts. In time, AMD will reveal all there is to know but Zen, but in the meantime, we now have a few additional details to share thanks to a computer engineer at CERN.CERN engineer Liviu Valsan recently gave a presentation on technology and market trends for the data center. At around 2 minutes into the discussion, he brought up AMD's Zen architecture with a slide that contained some previously undisclosed details (along with a few things we already...
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Following a shutdown of over two years for upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider — no doubt one of the largest pieces of hot hardware in the world — was brought back online yesterday at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC, which made good on its promise of delivering the Higgs boson in 2012, is now at last poised to begin making scientific history once again. “Congratulations,” CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer said to thousands of staff members from the control room of the Large Hadron Collider. “Now the hard work starts.” The news of the LHC's firing back to life was especially gratifying, as early last week it looked as though the resumption of proton-smashing by the LHC would be delayed...
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It’s hard to believe, but 20 years ago yesterday, there was no publicly available World Wide Web. Sure, the Internet existed (and had for many years), but it wasn’t until Tim Berners-Lee (pictured), working at CERN, developed the software necessary to make the Web the information superhighway that it is today. (When’s the last time you heard someone drag out that old "information superhighway" chestnut?) The difference that the Web has made in the world is undeniable and cannot be overstated, but many of us alive today fit into a generational niche where we’re old enough to remember trying to navigate life, school, work, and relationships without the Web but are young...
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Remember last year when physicists at CERN said they were pretty sure that they found the God particle? Now, after sifting through the data, they believe that they have indeed found the elusive Higgs boson particle. A physicist on the team and the group’s spokesman, Joe Incandela, said that "The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is." Large Hadron Collider The so-called God particle is thought to help explain how the universe came into being; that is, how elementary particles acquire mass. One question that the team has yet...
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Faster than the speed of light? Normally we think of The Flash, Superman, or perhaps a Federation starship using warp drive. In other words, we think science fiction or comic books. After all, surpassing that speed would overturn one of the fundamental laws of physics, Einstein's theory of relativity, often simply known by the equation E = mc2. However, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, believe they have discovered subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That said, with physics potentially about to be turned upside down, the scientists are so astounded by the discovery that they are asking others to verify them. Antonio...
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The Large Hadron Collider, damaged by a liquid helium leak relatively soon after being started for the first time, had already had its restart date pushed back from a few months, to spring, to June, to late summer. Now it is being pushed back to the end of September - over a year after the world's largest particle accelerator was knocked offline. According to the press release, collisions could follow the restart in late October. The LHC would shut down shortly over Christmas, and then run through to autumn 2010. CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said: "The schedule we have now is without a doubt the best for the LHC and for the physicists waiting for data. It is cautious, ensuring that all the...
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DigiTimes is reporting that motherboard vendors are voicing some concerns regarding ATI's latest Crossfire Xpress 3200 chipset and the availability of the matching ULI southbridge. Now that ULI is owned and operated by rival NVIDIA, vendors are worried that allocation of the ULI southbridge could become a serious issue. Fortunately for ATI, the company will be releasing a new southbridge dubbed SB600 next quarter which should offer a huge improvement over their previous southbridge offferings. However, it sounds as though motherboard vendors are still very much concerned in the interim.Motherboard makers, on the other hand, commented that although the RD580 can be partnered with ATI's own SB450...
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