12/05/2016
2016 Lecture Series: The LHC Resumes Operation and Prepares Its Future
Lecture: "CERN Computing for Science and Its Impact on Society"
Speakers:
Maite Barroso López. Deputy Head of Information Technology, CERN
Pippa Wells. Convenor of Upgrade Physics Group, Physics Department, CERN
Synopsis
Imagine being able to take forty million HD images a second and decide instantly which to keep for later analysis! This challenge, faced daily by the LHC detectors and the CERN Computing Centre, will be the subject of our talk.
The quasi-instantaneous reconstruction of events using the data provided by the various detector tiers calls for complex synchronization and filtering algorithms. This process enables physicists to identify the particles generated and the most interesting collisions so they can be stored for more detailed study.
Bio notes
Maite Barroso holds a degree in telecommunications engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. She joined CERN in 2001 and is currently Deputy Head of Information Technology, the department that handles data processing and storage and communication and support networks for the whole experimental program.
She led the EGEE grid infrastructure employed by diverse scientific disciplines, which federates over 250 resource centers worldwide, providing 100,000 CPU cores and several petabytes of disk storage.
Pippa Wells is an experimental particle physicist at CERN. After completing her doctorate in 1990 at the University of Cambridge, she took up a research post at CERN investigating the subtle effects of local electric trains on the LEP magnets and the effects of Earth tides on the accelerator tunnel, in order to enable precise measurements of the Z and W boson masses.
From there she moved to the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, a collaboration of over 3,000 scientists. More recently, she has led studies to demonstrate the physics potential of the ATLAS detector upgrade in the frame of the high-luminosity LHC.
