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Cern
Business Intelligence is essential for physicists at Cern to pick out useful information from the 15 petabytes of data generated every time it fires up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator.
The nuclear research laboratory on the Swiss-French border is aiming to find out how the universe works and what it's made of by colliding protons against each other at 99 per cent the speed of light. The energies generated when particles collide within the LHC are equivalent to those fractions of a second after the Big Bang, and physicists hope these conditions will offer a glimpse at the Higgs Boson, a particle thought to give mass to the universe.
The four detectors within Cern's particle accelerator - each looking for different particles and energy signatures - have built-in electronics and attached computer centres that analyse and throw away the bulk of the data they collect.
Years of data from collisions within previous particle accelerators at Cern allow the sensors to judge what parts of the data from LHC collisions will not yield interesting or new observations, and therefore be discarded.
The remaining useful data is analysed onsite within the Cern Computer Centre and by machines in the LHC Computing Grid, a global network of more than 100,000 processors, in the hope of finding out more about how the universe operates.
Photo credit: Cern
