Why Your Analytics Has NOTHING On The Hadron Collider
So you think you know all about analytics? Patting yourself on the back about your latest cross-channel attribution modelling and the terabytes of data you’ve successfully corralled into a database? Time for a little perspective — because there’s big data and then there’s BIG data.
While brand managers the world over complain about the deluge of data they need to make sense of these days, data scientists at CERN are trying to solve the mysteries of the universe using facilities like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator. Sifting through billions of data points from a fire hose measurable in terabytes per second, the data challenges faced by CERN’s physicists dwarf those of most commercial entities.
Bob Jones is the Project Leader at CERN, who is a driving force behind CERN’s information management expertise and was the Head of CERN openlab between January 2012 and December 2014.
Among the many challenges Jones and his colleagues face is trying to gather insights from more than 20 petabytes of data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider every year and, in particular, isolating the small number of particle collisions involving the elusive Higgs particle from the vast stream of event data.
To quantify the magnitude of this task, Jones explains: “During Run 1, the LHC produced six million billion proton-proton collisions… Of these, only around 400 produced results compatible with the Higgs particle, whose discovery was announced in July 2012. So you can see that identifying the right 400 events out of six million billion proton-proton collisions is really like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
To manage this scale of data effectively, CERN has been a long-time champion of distributed processing and innovative data storage approaches.
According to Jones, “CERN and the physics community has been a driving force in the development of grid computing since the year 2001. This has led to the deployment of a production infrastructure with a global footprint known as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, or WLCG for short, which provides the resources to store, distribute and analyse the data from the LHC.”
Jones works in the IT department of CERN, which serves the whole organisation and has a critical role to play in supporting the scientific programme. Understandably, “It is a very demanding environment with continuous renewal and upgrades to services.”
Despite — or perhaps because of — this pressure, Jones says he is constantly impressed by the quality of the people he works with, including the numerous world-class experts on site, and their approach to tackling vast and complex tasks. “CERN has a university campus feel about it and the people are very open and willing to help and collaborate.”
We asked Jones to describe what for him and his colleagues are the biggest challenges of big data at CERN. The challenges are many and varied: “It is the combination of storage capacity, access patterns and sometimes unpredictable analysis workloads that are the biggest challenge,” he said.
As well as dealing with the voluminous data produced by CERN’s many experiments, the speed with which physicists develop and change focus in their experimental work adds to the data-management challenge. According to Jones, research moves quickly and those involved can’t always predict which particular dataset will prove to be the most popular and require the most resources.
“So our system needs to be very dynamic. We have a 3.5 MW computer centre on-site in Geneva and have leased space in a second computer centre at Wigner in Budapest, Hungary.
“We are ready for Run 2 of the LHC, which started in June 2015 with the experiments taking data at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV, following the two-year long shutdown. We have multiple 100Gbps lines linking the two centres, which enables us to operate them as a single OpenStack cloud.”
And the volume of data is set to continue growing. The LHC experiments have already recorded 100 times more data for the summer conferences this year than they had around the same time after the LHC started up at 7 TeV in 2010, he says.
On the grid
While CERN originally hosted all IT services on-site in a traditional service provision model, as the needs of the scientific programme expanded it focused more heavily on developing off-site data processing and management capability through grid computing.
This approach has allowed CERN to federate IT resources from partner organisations around the world, as well as scale storage and processing power more efficiently. The cloud services market — originated by Amazon Web Services back in 2002 and much-loved by data scientists in publishing and other high-data-volume sectors — has proved a powerful tool for CERN as well.
“This market now offers us new opportunities to increase the scale and range of the IT services we can build on. We are working towards a hybrid cloud model, where we can we can opportunistically use any resources taking into account availability, price and policy.”
He said CERN is actively investigating this approach with cloud service companies and other research organisations in the context of the Helix Nebula initiative. “So seeking new opportunities and keeping flexible enough to profit from them is a key aspect of our strategy at CERN. But we have learnt that operating production services at this scale is not something that can be improvised.”
According to Jones, “Every time we have had to increase scale it has required development which takes time and advanced planning. Similarly, the importance of preserving data is paramount. CERN puts significant resources into bit-level preservation of data, including the use of tape systems where the technology continues to evolve.”
This archived data must be actively managed to ensure it remains available for future use, he said. However there is most certainly a balancing act required to ensure CERN holds on to meaningful scientific data but doesn’t unintentionally house excessive volumes of meaningless information.
“At this scale it is not possible to keep all the data (the LHC produces up to a Petabyte of data per second) and it is essential to have efficient data-filtering mechanisms so that we can separate the wheat from the chaff. A key risk is throwing away the data you need and cannot reproduce.”
We also asked Jones if the approach to data analysis or exploration is very different when dealing with the vast quantities of data from the Large Hadron Collider or if the thought processes are similar to smaller-scale experiments, just executed using tools capable of handling greater scale.
“The volume of data produced at the LHC is a challenge, but the process is similar for smaller-scale experiments,” he said
“Particles collide at high energies inside the detectors, creating new particles that decay in complex ways as they move through layers of subdetectors. The subdetectors register each particle’s passage and microprocessors convert the particles’ paths and energies into electrical signals, combining the information to create a digital summary of the collision event.”
The raw data per event is around one million bytes (1 MB), produced at a rate of about 600 million events per second. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid tackles this mountain of data in a two-stage process.
First, it runs dedicated algorithms written by physicists to reduce the number of events and select those considered interesting — a sophisticated winnowing out of noise from the data sets. “Analysis can then focus on the most important data — that which could bring new physics measurements or discoveries.”
When it comes to analytical tools, it’s unsurprising to hear that CERN’s data scientists have built and tweaked their own analytical toolkit. “The physics community has progressively developed, over a number of years, a set of software tools dedicated to this task. These tools are constantly being improved to ensure they continue work at the growing scale of the LHC data challenge. ROOT is a popular data-analysis framework — it is a bit like R on steroids.”
Jones says that grid computing has also been immensely helpful in enabling physicists to run analysis at scale. “Grid computing helps by providing an underlying global infrastructure with the capacity to be able to match the analysis needs of the LHC. But the grid itself is evolving to make more use of cloud computing techniques and profit from the improvements in hardware (processors, storage etc.) as well as the cost-effectiveness of high performance networks.”
Lessons for brands
The CERN Data Centre has the ability to process incredibly high throughput in order to manage the data coming out of the Large Hadron Collider. That prompts the question of whether there will be many situations in which the commercial sector would need that extreme throughput capability.
According to Jones, “CERN is a leader but not alone in having to deal with such high data throughputs. We expect to see similar scales in other sciences (such as next generation genome sequencing as well as the Square Kilometre Array which will primarily be deployed in Australia and South Africa) and various business sectors linked to the growing Internet of Things in the near future.”
He described CERN as being ahead of the curve, and said the technologies and processes developed — as well as the lessons learned — at CERN can be applied in other fields. However, he emphasised that CERN’s advanced capabilities are not acquired by happenstance — the organisation spends a great deal of effort in growing the skills needed to develop cutting-edge data solutions.
“Education is a key element of CERN’s mission. For those working at CERN, we have technical and management training programmes and series of computing seminars as well as the CERN School of Computing. We are constantly recruiting young scientists, engineers and technicians who also bring new skills and ideas into CERN’s environment. Engagement with leading IT companies through CERN openlab has been a source of many new developments and helps train successive generations of personnel in the latest techniques, ” he said.
CERN is also a poster child for the power of not only open source but also a culture of organisational openness. Jones said, “CERN’s open culture coupled with developments such as commercial cloud services where an organisation’s data may be stored off-site, and a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy for the site, means we have to be proactive to ensure everyone respects intellectual property rights and the relevant data protection legislation.
“We are also active in the deployment of federated identity-management systems for access to IT services, and such a model has been in place for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid since its creation.”
This article originally appeared at www.which-50.com
Latest News
The Mars Agency Announces Latest Findings Of Retail Media Report Card
The Mars Agency has developed a scorecard that assesses the capabilities of leading platforms across key criteria required to optimally plan, execute, and measure effective retail media programs. The scorecard aims To help brands efficiently evaluate their spending options across retail media networks in Australia (and New Zealand). With spending on retail media advertising in […]
‘It’s The Lesser Of Two Evils’ – NRL Eyes US Betting Market As Aussie Regulators Circle
US betting firms will be delighted by the circa 50,000 Americans who could soon watch the NRL on their favourite app.
A-League In Deep Discussions With New Partner To Keep Games On TV After Production Company Enters Administration
The A-League's insatiable appetite for scoring own goals continues.
TV Ratings (27/03/2024): Jungle Members At War Over Concealed Lipstick
A heated argument between two jungle members did the numbers for Ten last night, with I’m A Celeb obtaining a total national reach of 1,282,000. Fans were delighted as Candice Warner and influencer Skye Wheatley got into it over a stick of lipstick, leading Warner to dub the Instagram star “selfish.” Wheatley, best known for […]
Is The Australian Music Industry In Trouble? Inquiry Launched Following Splendour Cancellation
Earlier this week, an inquiry was launched into the challenges and opportunities currently facing the Australian live music industry in the wake of multiple festival cancellations. On 25 March 2024, the Minister for the Arts, the Hon. Tony Burke MP, asked the Committee on Communications and the Arts to inquire into and report on the […]
Liana Dubois, Leandro Perez, Aimee Buchanan & More Gather For Inaugural Compadres Leadership Event
Didn't get the invite? Perhaps you're not as important as you thought.
Cathay Captures The Unforgettable Thrill Of Cathay/HSBC Hong Kong Rugby Sevens, Via Publicis
Nobody does rugby like Hong Kong, apparently. Certainly nobody does it as badly as Australia.
Cocogun Nabs Christine Watts, Kirsty Reynolds & Shev Tan Bolstering Management & Creative Teams
Cocogun bolsters its team with new hires. Committed to purchasing a bigger sofa, too.
The Media Store’s Jacquie Alley & Sam Cousins Take The Plunge With Pro-Bono Work For Cure Cancer
B&T chats with The Media Store bosses about their great pro-bono work and sponsored swim.
Hawke’s Brewing Co. Taps Rocket Comms For PR Agency Following Competitive Pitch
We're expecting Rocket Comms productivity to crash in spectacular fashion following this win.
Spotlight On Sponsors: Patties Serves Up A Taste Of Home For Olympians & South Sydney Rabbitohs Recommit To Gambling Reform
While the Rabbitohs commits to gambling reform, B&T reckons the team should commit to a decent auto sponsor.
Google: “Inevitable” That Bad Actors Will Abuse Ads Platform As Advertiser Account Suspensions Double
Google maintains it's simply impossible for it to entirely stop bad people placing & paying for ads using its service.
Quantcast Expands APAC Sales Team With Appointment Of News Corp Account Manager
No pressure at all when you are appointed as a client success manager.
Publicis Sapient Tests Microsoft-Powered Gen AI Search Tool With Homes & Villas By Marriott Bonvoy
Given Gen AI's record for mangling stuff, B&T cannot see the problem with letting it decide your next holiday digs.
Volkswagen & DDB Group’s “Roo Badge” To Reduce Kangaroo Related Road Collisions
Watch out for RooBadge as Cannes Lions' most debated campaign this year.
Twilio Launches Unified Profiles & Agent Copilot Features To Boost Productivity & Engagement
Agent Copilot sounds like James Bond's less interesting cousin.
Reebok & Honda Among New Clients For onetwo agency
OneTwo finally lives up to its name with this double billing.
Ogilvy Report: Throw Out The Social Strategy Rule Book, The Rules Of The Past No Longer Apply
B&T was puzzled that all 'influencers' aren't, effectively, 'virtual', but here we are.
WhiteGREY & AKQA Merge In Australia, Lee Simpson Departs
Fortunately, the combined agencies aren't opting for a trite portmanteau for the new name.
Splendour In The Grass 2024 Music Festival Cancelled!
Music fans all over the country reportedly relieved they can pack away their rain coats and gumboots for another year.
TV Ratings (26/03/2024): “Fairy Bread, F***ing Disgusting”: Gordon Ramsay Slams Aussie Food In Food Stars Launch
Ramsay not one for mincing his words, even when it comes to minced meat pies.
Paramount+ International Boss Doubles Down On Aussie Content, Says Ad-Tier will Grow Audiences And Revenue
Good news as Paramount will not be binning I’m A Celebrity for re-runs of Frasier.
Brent Smart: Telstra Pushing For 50-50 Brand-Performance Split But Warns Numbers ‘Won’t Look Great’ Initially
The old brand vs performance debate continues. But here, Brent is firmly sitting on the fence.
Crowded House, Tones And I & Dom Dolla Win Big At The Shure Rolling Stone Music Awards
B&T staffer reports back with humdinger of a hangover & feeling seriously uncool after mixing with music types.
Opinion: Dyslexia “A Hidden Gem” For Brands & Agencies
Dyslexics offer underappreciated benefits in the corporate field, according to this op-ed.
David Jones Taps Criteo To Power Online Retail Media Arm
Want to see ads for things you probably can't afford? David Jones has got you covered with new retail media play.
oOh!media Sets Up Team To Target Business Audiences Across Airports & Offices
oOh! wants brands to harass you every minute of your next business trip.
QMS Launches Australian First DOOH & TV Partnership With Samba TV
Samba TV, of course, is not a channel dedicated to dancing. Much to our dismany.
Slew Of New Hires At Amplify
Four new faces join the Amplify offices. Team say desk scarcity becoming "acute".
Adobe Announces Content Authenticity Initiative Expansions To Counter Deep Fakes
Try as they might to enlighten them, we suspect Trump supporters will continue to watch and believe Fox News.
The PR Group Appoints TechCrunch Senior Reporter Catherine Shu As Director Of Content & Media
Catherine Shu makes the bold leap from journalism to PR. Says inevitable pay bump was "unrelated".
HERO Nabs Ebony Santin From AMPR
Rumours Santin cleared out the stationery cupboard before departing are as yet unconfirmed.
Karena Noble Checks Out Of EVT Hotels & Resorts To Launch Comms Consultancy
Noble still managed to squeezed in a continental breakfast before departing.
Canva Acquires Design Platform Affinity To Bring Professional Design Tools To Every Organisation
Canva & Adobe face off continues. We're not picking sides but keenly aware that Canva's office is next door to ours.
“Lean On Our Team To Help You Find An Audience”: Why Understanding Audience Engagement Is Essential In Journalism
Engaging the audience is critical to journos, apparently. We'd thought self-loathing & alcoholism were key.
Adobe Summit: Major Gen AI Developments, Data Concessions & Partnerships
What happens in Vegas stays there. Unless it's the Adobe Summit and then you get to read about in B&T.