Intel-Powered Macs Now The Physicist’s Choice
A Large Ion Collider Experiment, aka “ALICE,” is a mega-project with a micro-objective – to explore the nature of matter at the smallest levels. This study will ultimately produce 10 petabytes of data every year – the amount of information handled by the entire European telecommunications network, or the equivalent of a stack of 750 MB CD’s 20 km (15 miles) high.
The physicists at the CERN international particle physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland have chosen the new Intel-powered Apple computers to assist them in handling this massive amount of data.
“Now that Apple has moved to Intel processors, we see real opportunities to use the Mac as our main computational engine”, says Federico Carminati, ALICE Computing Coordinator. “Apple is a very nice solution which offers two environments in one system — UNIX processing power and the world of office applications”.
ALICE’s computing framework has been under construction for many years. Because of the specialized nature of the research, the physicists must be able to design their own software. Data from the ALICE study will be stored in a mixed network of 40 computing centers located across the globe.
A Large Ion Collider Experiment, aka “ALICE,” is a mega-project with a micro-objective – to explore the nature of matter at the smallest levels. This study will ultimately produce 10 petabytes of data every year – the amount of information handled by the entire European telecommunications network, or the equivalent of a stack of 750 MB CD’s 20 km (15 miles) high.
The physicists at the CERN international particle physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland have chosen the new Intel-powered Apple computers to assist them in handling this massive amount of data.
“Now that Apple has moved to Intel processors, we see real opportunities to use the Mac as our main computational engine”, says Federico Carminati, ALICE Computing Coordinator. “Apple is a very nice solution which offers two environments in one system — UNIX processing power and the world of office applications”.
ALICE’s computing framework has been under construction for many years. Because of the specialized nature of the research, the physicists must be able to design their own software. Data from the ALICE study will be stored in a mixed network of 40 computing centers located across the globe.
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