CERN map
Source: Symmetry Magazine via Duke Physics

According to this playful map by Symmetry Magazine, we live somewhere in France between the Kingdom of CMS and the Canton of Alice. My regular running path takes me past a large access point to the CERN accelerator, which is 17 miles (27 km) in circumference. If it were shown on this map, I suppose it would be a large gate with a drawbridge.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest high-energy particle accelerator and arguably the largest microscope ever constructed, generates almost unimaginable amounts of data when it is running. Actually, it’s on a hiatus right now, but that doesn’t really matter much because there is so much data to process and examine before the LHC starts up again in 18 months. There’s a good article in Symmetry Magazine on how the LHC is a model for the processing of big data, a challenge faced all over the world in a number of sectors. Here’s a big infographic on big data.

Big Data
Source: Wipro.com via Infographicsmania.com

Collaboration strategies for big data are driving many of the open science initiatives today, not to mention commercial, artistic, military and government projects. For me, big data processing holds promise when applied to shared data that creates large, publicaly available collaborative projects like OneZoom (a phylogenetic tree project), or the LHC, or Wikipedia for that matter. Big data shows its teeth as well as its shortcomings with surveillance capabilities.

To get an idea of just how much data is ‘big’, another helpful illustration.

Big Data Comparison
Source: Symmetry Magazine

Finally, here’s a short film on just how LHC manages to collect and process those massive quantities of information.

More:

Symmetry Magazine article – Particle physics tames big data, by Leah Hesla

You can also view the CERN short film here.