Where is that?
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That is the Cern 'Data Centre' located in the Cern complex in Switzerland. It is known as the heart of CERN’s entire scientific, administrative, and computing infrastructure. All services, including email, scientific data management and video conferencing use equipment based here.
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What's shown in the photograph?
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We could see just a few of the 230,000 processor cores and 15 000 servers units which run 24/7 storing data from around the facility.
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Is that the only place where Cern store their Data?
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No, it is not the only place where data is stored. Over 90% of the resources for computing in the Data Centre are provided through a private cloud based on OpenStack, an open-source project to deliver a massively scalable cloud operating system. This is vital as if a power surge were to occur, all the data is safely found in the cloud.
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Does anyone else have access to Cern's Data?
There are many other data storage unit around the world. Those countries which contributed heavily to the Cern projects receive a fair amount of data processed by the colliders.
What is that?
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That is one of the first data storage units to ever be made for Cern's 'Data Centre'.
It was manufactured back when the Apollo 12 program was still functioning. It was able to store just kilobytes of data in the time.
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What is it made of?
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It consists of a plastic square with copper wires arranged in a complex manner. The order of the wires allows the device to store data. This was used back in the early 1960s.
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What is that?
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That is another type of data storage. It is a later model and more efficient in storing data. It was used in the later 20th century for storing Cern's data. It was able to store megabytes of data rather than kilobytes.
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Can you explain the photograph?
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The shape and form of this device looked very interesting. So I decided to shoot it in an abstract way as it clearly translates technology after observing its form. Grayscale was used to keep the image straight to the point and helped define its abstract aspect. It could also be considered to be a little deadpan too.
What is shown above?
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Above is a photograph taken at the 'CMS Detector' cable room. This holds data storage in France to then be transmitted to the private cloud based server, OpenStack in Geneva Switzerland as shown in the other photographs.
Fun Fact!
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Each particle collision in the 'LHC' needs 2GB of data to calculate. 10,000 collisions are made every second during a run. So just imagine how much data needs to be processed for each run.
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Approximately 100 Petabytes of Data is collected every year.
(1 Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes)
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(You may now go to the 'Final 15' section)