I am typing this message from CERN!

[Eeezee]

My department sent me to CERN for the summer to work on ATLAS (at the LHC).

This is great

Edit: Pics
On Friday I just had to take a break, and I was thirsty, so it's time to go to the water cooler! The best route to the water cooler is by going outside of the control room, so let's start there.

Pic of the outside of the control room. The scaffolding is for the "Imperial Entrance" that they're going to finish before the official startup. The big wooden building next to it is where ATLAS is stored. Parts were taken into this building and lowered down the shaft into the pit. Everything has already been lowered, so the pit has been sealed (I watched them lower the last bit of magnetic shielding + the giant concrete slabs to seal it all up)
Imperial Entrance
Big wooden building
CERN's famous big wooden ball
Giant containers, likely full of liquid nitrogen or helium

Here we are inside of the wooden building. Immediately as you enter you see the observation fence. See the long slabs of concrete? Under that is ATLAS
Observation fence
Looking out from the deck
Strange electronics. What do they do? I don't know!
More electronics

Here is an emergency stop panel. If you break the glass with the little hammer, it immediately cuts power to all non-essential electronics. Some things are immune to this, such as the superconducting magnets down below (cutting power will have them run indefinitely; they're superconductors! There are better ways to quench the magnets)
Emergency stop

This is the door to the server room. My ID badge opens this idoor by swiping it over that little black box on the left. There is a similar box next to the ATLAS control room entrance. This is the first floor, I've only been in this one and the second floor server room (on top of the first). It's great to go in there on a hot day. All saved events will pass through this server room (and a good deal of the rejected ones too, since the high level trigger is software-based).
Server room level 1

Here we are crossing over a platform they built over liquid cooling pipes. The water cooler is on the other side!
Doomed stairs
What's that red label over there
Ah-hah
WTF is that stuff?

Here we are, at the ATLAS lift. The blue doors are for group tours, the green for workers. In order to get through, you need key card access and you have to buzz the control room. Once the beam turns on, no one will be allowed through these doors. Behind them is the lift that goes down to ATLAS
ATLAS lift

At last, the water cooler! Also, that coffee machine next to it makes great coffee (and one of the best espressos I've ever had). This is important. They put it on the other end of the ATLAS shaft so that people would have to walk around for awhile on breaks. Scientists are smart like that; after sitting on my ass for several hours, I know I like to get up and move around.
Water cooler

Okay, let's head back to the control room. Passing by another emergency stop panel, we can also take a better look at the imperial entrance
Emergency stop
Imperial Entrance
Emergency stairwell (commonly used as the main entrance, as it faces the street)
ATLAS picture!


And we're back in front of the control room door. I've heard that they're going to make it look nicer later. Anyway, here we go
Control room door

And this is the control room. As you can see, there are countless computer screens and projectors. In the first picture, you can see our giant sticky note on the projector screen. The single computer monitor in the bottom right is connected to the computer that outputs to all of the projectors. Also, in the first picture you can see the GUI! It's on the far left projector. Right now they're only testing a few systems.
Control room left
Control room right

A few hours later and I get to go home. Here are some more pictures
Cooling towers
Distance shot of the control room structure
Entrance gate
CERN hires a guy to let his goats eat the grass. He'll be coming by any day now

I should make a note here. Every CERN building has a number. They're not exactly numbered in any reasonable way (building 54 may be next to building 947). If it has a numbered sign, it's a building. THIS is the entrance to a building
Building 991

CERN is right across the street from ATLAS, I work in building 54 over in CERN about half of the time, control room the other half

ATLAS entrance gate from the other side

That just about does it. I hope you guys enjoy the pictures!




EDIT: Live webcast of turn-on! http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2223277&enterthread=y

 

[PottedMeat]

If we hear about any fuckups on the news we'll know who to blame!



What do you do there?

 

[firewolfsm]

I want to be you in a few years, any advice?

were you a physics major?

 

[Born2bwire]

Must be cool experience. I worked at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source one summer. They told me that the best time to have worked there was when it was being built because that's when most of the real engineering and science work was going on. Once it was up and running, all the physics and such was left to the clients and most of the jobs that we did were simply maintainance.

Don't forget to check your film badge. Nothing says safety like knowing after the fact that you've received lethal doses of radiation.

 

[SonicIce]

pics plz :Q

 

[irishScott]

So you'll be among the first to be swallowed by Satan's Stargate.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Remember -

destroying the earth = bad

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: irishScott
So you'll be among the first to be swallowed by Satan's Stargate.

I lived in Britain for a few years, and sadly people this dumb are common.. But still, how on earth could this guy talk with a straight face?

man, im still listening to him blather, soooo funny, and still, so sad. Why incomplete, skewed information is BAD, very BAD. and yet way to common.

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: PottedMeat
If we hear about any fuckups on the news we'll know who to blame!



What do you do there?

As a grad student, I do odd jobs. As we ramp up to startup (ATLAS is turning on in October, after the beam has been going for awhile) more and more bugs are being fixed. All of the hardware is in place, we just need to get all of the software running correctly.

For instance, the CSCs (a type of muon detector) are probably operational, but no one has written the software to read the data! That's being worked on.

My job for the next 2-3 weeks is to write a program that will slurp data going through the high level trigger (a big computing farm that analyzes collision data and determines whether an event is useful or not - each computer has two quad-core CPUs). The data I spy on will be sent to a separate computing cluster for analysis, to ensure things are going smoothly (we don't want the high level trigger system to be rejecting useful events, for instance)

Luckily, this means I get control room access. That's where I'm typing from today! Each computer has at least 4 monitors attached to it, which makes coding really, really easy.

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: firewolfsm
I want to be you in a few years, any advice?

were you a physics major?

I started as an engineering major, and switched to Physics at the beginning of my second year. I got into high energy physics as a Junior and worked for the professor that taught me quantum. I applied to grad school, got in, and after the first year of courses they sent me to Switzerland. That was a month ago. Here's a tip, some applications have the option of applying to MS; go ahead and do that if you want them to reject you. You're free to leave early and take your MS on the way out the door if you get sick of it, but you should only apply to PhD programs.

My advice is to not be afraid of doing research early. We've brought an undergrad with us, he's only a Junior. High energy departments around the world are usually the best funded (with some notable exceptions). Having a well-funded department is very nice.

Research + good recommendation letters (which are closely linked to research) + at least mediocre Physics GRE scores = grad school anywhere you want

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: Born2bwire
Must be cool experience. I worked at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source one summer. They told me that the best time to have worked there was when it was being built because that's when most of the real engineering and science work was going on. Once it was up and running, all the physics and such was left to the clients and most of the jobs that we did were simply maintainance.

Don't forget to check your film badge. Nothing says safety like knowing after the fact that you've received lethal doses of radiation.

Film badges are a little scary, luckily we don't have to wear them here yet. I've seen the pit, so I know that the beam is actually really close to here. It should be deep enough underground that I won't need a film badge when doing shift in the control room.

Building the components is definitely the most fun, but the real science takes place after the data has come in. That is where the discoveries are made, after all. I'll have my name on a paper along with 4000 other collaborators once a new particle is found. I guess that'll be nice?

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: PlasmaBomb
Remember -

destroying the earth = bad

I agree. That's why when we threaten the world with black hole annihilation, the world will listen.

We demand pizza and beer! Bring it to us or face the consequences!

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: SonicIce
pics plz :Q

They'll be coming. I don't know of any good hosting sites.

Here is a webcam of where I am working
http://pcatdwww.cern.ch/atlas-point1/ATLASview/ACR.htm
This is the main control room. As you can see, each terminal has at least 4 monitors and some have up to 8.

See all of those projects on the ceiling? The wall is displaying full readouts of what is going on, and an outdated weekend schedule. No one said it was perfect...

Right now I am on the desk on the far left of the photo, by the door (which is the main access door). You can sort of see my head. Everyone is taking a lunch break right now (since we're in Europe, lunch generally goes from 1-3PM). The middle desk is the run control station, it controls everything else. I'm schedule to run shift there for August + September.

On the projector wall, from my right to left (webcam on my left):
- Outdated M8 schedule - M8 ended at 1AM last night. It was from Fri Jul 11 to Sun Jul 20. M8 was essentially a dress rehearsal; we bring all of the systems online and man the stations from 9AM-5PM and 5PM-1AM before setting everything up for an overnight run (we can detect cosmic rays). There have been many like it, M7, M6, etc, and there will be many more I'm sure.

- List of ATLAS alarms. It's essentially a big red screen with all of the errors and warnings that the system is throwing. It's a long list.

- Tile calorimeter readout - everything looks okay here, it also has cosmic ray detections displayed on an overview of ATLAS. Very cool

- Empty space - There is no connected projector... I wonder where it is

- TDAQ GUI - Trigger and Data Acquisition. It has a full list of all of the high level trigger software running, including status and error messages (we've gotten it mostly under control, warnings still pop up here and there but it's working for the most part).

- IS monitor, a list of all of the detector algorithms currently operating. It prints some pretty colorful graphs

- Not sure what the one on the far left is, it looks similar to the TDAQ GUI. The desks over there are for muon detection and level one trigger people (level one trigger is hardware based and throws away a large number of events before sending them to us, at the high level trigger, for additional cuts).

Okay, I'm ending my lunch break now, back to work. I'll update every few days. Ask any questions you want!

 

[x2 3600 rules sazakky]

Originally posted by: Eeezee
My department sent me to CERN for the summer to work on ATLAS (at the LHC).

This is great

go home

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: x2 3600 rules sazakky

Originally posted by: Eeezee
My department sent me to CERN for the summer to work on ATLAS (at the LHC).

This is great

go home

?

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

I am very jealous of you for being there at the site where it started when the world gets destroyed.

 

[nerp]

If I see a report in a few weeks about "engineering delays" I'm going to visualize some dude at CERN tapping away on AT forums rather than doing his job coding.

hehee.

 

[herm0016]

cool job. I got a chance to talk to a few guys from the tevatron at fermi this past weekend, they are excited to have the lhc come on line.

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: nerp
If I see a report in a few weeks about "engineering delays" I'm going to visualize some dude at CERN tapping away on AT forums rather than doing his job coding.

hehee.

Luckily the high level trigger group is basically finished. My components are basically just extra features; optimizing the load across every node so that if we have to press the big red stop button, all of the nodes stop as quickly as possible, sending additional data to people running the system to ensure that everything is running smoothly, etc. It's a good image though;

The people you really have to worry about are the CSC guys (Cathode Strip Chamber I believe, they're for muon detection). Their hardware is obviously installed, but without the software to read the signals... well, the ATLAS has a lot of muon chambers that don't work right now

Also, ATLAS isn't turning on for awhile, much later than collisions. We're supposed to have collisions in the LHC by September, and ATLAS is turning on in October.

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: herm0016
cool job. I got a chance to talk to a few guys from the tevatron at fermi this past weekend, they are excited to have the lhc come on line.

It'd be impossible without them. If I remember correctly, they designed the dipole magnets that align the beam. Fermilab is awesome

 

[Born2bwire]

Originally posted by: Eeezee

Originally posted by: herm0016
cool job. I got a chance to talk to a few guys from the tevatron at fermi this past weekend, they are excited to have the lhc come on line.

It'd be impossible without them. If I remember correctly, they designed the dipole magnets that align the beam. Fermilab is awesome

They also sent you bad ones in the beginning just to remind you who was boss. I got to walk the main beam at Fermi a while back. They had it shut down as they were adding the booster ring at the time and was holding a big open house, letting the public tour the facilities. Really cool facility and the D0 detector was an awesome sight too, can only imagine how the detectors look over at CERN.

 

[Eeezee]

Yeah, there was that one quadrupole magnet explosion... but there were so many, statistically it was almost bound to happen.

 

[nova2]

the area where you work, is it underground? just wondering. If so, how long does the elevator take to arrive at your level?

 

[tomcat2200]

If you want to host pics, then photobucket works well.

 

[Sheninat0r]

Dude, that's effing amazing. I want to be at CERN.