* CTA for tape storage: https://cta.docs.cern.ch/v5/

* EOS for disk storage: https://eos-web.web.cern.ch/eos-web/

There is a large CEPH cluster as well but that isn't really used for physics data.

Hard to Google for it without getting AI slop on it, but apparently they built their own stack in 2019.

Not sure I like their solution, "Meta-data is persisted in RocksDB databases using a proprietary KV store called QuarkDB." Unless QuarkDB has magically removed RocksDB's amazing ability to corrupt and lose data frequently, this whole thing sounds like a bad idea.

Also, their data is not stored on any one system (local XFS, Ceph, Lustre), a recipe for disaster.

> Data is stored natively in XFS filesystems on hard disks or SSDs or on virtualised back-end storage (e.g. RADOS block devices) or distributed filesystems like Lustre or CephFS.

You can have more than one pool.

So long as the market recovers before HL-LHC starts and the data volume increases it'll be okay. If it doesn't...

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acern.ch+%22large+hard...

They’re not saying goodbye to the LHC, they’re upgrading it to have 10x the power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Luminosity_Large_Hadron_C...

That's the wiki article for the new one. Says "Increasing LHC luminosity involves reduction of the beam size at the collision point, and either the reduction of bunch length and spacing, or significant increase in bunch length and population."

The linked article says the new one will have "between 140 and 200 proton–proton collisions in every bunch crossing, compared to around 60 during the last LHC run." So the "10x luminosity" seems to be composed of ~3x more protons at a time along with presumably a ~3x tighter focused beam.

energy is per individual collision

can't increase energy that much without increasing radius

The nutjob article (yes, I did read it, LOL) suggested that they had found some universal truth maybe about God or aliens or something, and it scared them so much they just noped out of the science business to prepare themselves for the inevitable revealing of the "truth".

It is truly no wonder that so much of society is so fundamentally fucking stupid when their trusted information sources are so full of obviously false bullshit.

I can't wait until the LHC is back online zipping tiny things around the ring again in a cosmic demolition derby to find the smallest specs of our reality and give them all whimsical names.

And of course there was the whole panic about them creating a black hole and destroying the world that was popular enough to make mainstream media.

Sometimes I wonder if we actually deserve science as a species.

It's not. You got baited into thinking this is the case.

> are so full of obviously false bullshit.

Well, maybe what's less obvious is that there are a lot more people gawking at how stupid other people can be than fools falling for the bullshit you call out.

I was like, "They are abandoning LHC? How come I never heard of the big news?" Turns out the title is absolutely misleading.

If it continued to completion, it would have had almost 3x the beam energy of even the upgraded LHC in 2030 (20TeV vs. 7TeV). But the questions are fundamentally political, not scientific: Would SSC operations and funding have continued through the US economic challenges of 2001, 2008, and 2020?

I could see a timeline in which the SSC got built and discovered the Higgs boson before LHC came online, causing the LHC to be canceled, delayed, and/or starved of funding -- only for the SSC to be shuttered during the "great recession" of 2008 or during any other US Gov't belt tightening exercise. Today we would have neither the SSC nor the LHC.

Or, perhaps SSC would have accelerated other discoveries by 10 to 15 years (SSC go-live was to be in the late-1990's versus LHC's Higgs discovery in 2012).

Basic research has such a long time horizon it's interesting to think of the fundamental grants that might have been affected. Quantum computing? CRISPR? mRNA?

Also, the web was invented at CERN, so like the other comment said, if someone deserves at gTLD is them.

Happy to learn about details if someone knows more!

Even without the descent, my tour was great with showing the 70 year timeline, historical early particle accelerator equipment, and a cool view of the ATLAS control room. The facility is awe inspiring and a testament to Europe's willingness to make long-term commitments to furthering science research for the public good.

Edit Looks like it’s very different; and really cool: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2928802/files/ATL-ITK-PROC-2025-0...

The other machines in the complex, which we call "injectors" from our mighty tower, have already undergone their own upgrade to be ready for HL-LHC, the LIU (https://home.cern/accelerator-chain-prepares-high-luminosity...).

Nonetheless there are plenty of things to be done and a lot of technologically engaging challenges ahead so this 3-4 years is still ambitious ;)

I think only surpassed by the SETI program in terms of doing it because many nerds think it's really cool.

Uh, did you really mean that? The "entire" rest of the world? Even Iran and North Korea?

Well, it seems the "entire rest of the world" is only the so-called "good guys", according to the current political regime funding it.

I'm intimately familiar with how high-energy physicists get hired and funded. The funding comes from the political and budget bucket labeled "nuke stuff".

E.g., Fermilab is under the U.S. Department of Energy. CERN is funded by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Etc., etc.

Politicians fund this stuff only because it triggers their wunderwaffen FOMO.

So you don't know that CERN is the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, that's even worse than what I expected.

CERN as in the facility in Meyrin.

I've been there, walked the halls, etc. Don't lecture me.

Standing inside LHCb (one of the experiments where they track collisions) was one of my most awe-inspiring moments about science and technology. Photos don’t do it justice. It’s a multi-story building underground, but every inch is covered with cables, sensors etc. Seeing it on photos is one thing, standing inside the biggest machine built by humankind is a completely different experience and hard to put into words.

The amount of thinking and planning that went into it is insane. CERN staff is super-friendly and open to talk and explain. If you have the possibility to visit, do it - especially with guided tours and on their annual Open Days.

Is that even legal under Swiss discrimination laws?

Examples:

https://repository.cern/records/ypas9-j5751

https://cds.cern.ch/record/1035110/files/cer-002693576.pdf

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/status-update-icrcs-legal-s...

- The International Cooperation Agreement has been terminated in 2023, following the invasion of Ukraine (https://international-relations.web.cern.ch/stakeholder-rela...)

- Their recruitment policy states they source among their member states except when they really really can't find someone to fill a position from there (https://careers.cern/recruitment-policy/).

I'm not sure if / how that works together with discrimination laws, however, discrimination is a different subject than nationality I think. I can't just work in the US, not because I'm Dutch but because of visum / labor / market protection / etc laws. And with CERN, added factors to consider are international funding, espionage, sabotage, etc. Some countries may decide to pull funding if CERN were to, for example, continue working with Russia or hire Russians.

tl;dr it's a lot more complicated than discrimination.

You might disagree on that but we all know that it was political pressure.

Your comment above makes me think of Sabine Hossenfelder[1]. I'm sure you must've heard of her. I know she's somewhat of a "polarizing" figure. As a former "insider", do you think her core point stands? (Which is, the particle physics field has largely nothing to show for after spending billions of public money. Some particle physicists have even predicted so-called "unparticles", which almost sounds like trolling!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder

You say yourself that this situation can be simply an effect due to the experiment lifetime, and I also think it's a reasonable hypothesis.

What gives me pause with Hossenfelder is that she jumps to another conclusion, without any good observation for it or without scientific approach. These conclusions seem to be fed by the easy trap of "it's a conspiracy". We know how easy it is for people to give credit to these theses and to totally overlook that some claims are, in practice, totally unrealistic (so we have thousands of new PhD students and postdocs exploring how it works every year, the majority of them leaving the field, and strangely, the very very big majority choose, for absolutely no good reason, to keep hidden the secret they saw).

I agree with some of Hossenfelder's observations, but I find her conclusions often unsubstantiated, overstating elements that are more realistically way rarer than what she described and overlooking plenty of valid hypotheses. The fact that these "great revelations" brings her viewership also fit with a slow crank-ification. The fact that she also released videos on subjects outside of her domain and that these videos contained a lot of approximation also does not give a good image of how reliable is her approach (not that it is a crime to not know something outside of your field of expertise, but it should be something that a good scientist should be fully aware of, and they should simply not do such video in the first place).

I'm not sure if there is a real "taboo" to openly agree with her, I think it is more about the fact that she destroyed herself her own reputation with bad calls and bad conclusions, and people don't really want to tarnish themselves by association.

But in general, I don't value "individual groundbreaking research". This is a very "Disney" view on how science work: a misunderstood genius that makes a discovery that the "scientific elite" refuses to acknowledge. Or very "Ayn Rand" or "Elon Musk" view, with all the teenage hedgelord energy associated to it. The myth of the "one-man-groundbreaking-discovery" makes for good entertainment, but even if it is 95% stupid and not 100% (yeah, individual contribution matters, yeah, inertia and misplaced skepticism exists, so what), that's a 12-year-old kid fantasy.

I'm not saying this person is not reliable, I don't know. But if her research is valuable, it will come out, and not because of one person. With Hossenfelder, the situation just turned into a media circus, which is just not useful at all. Such situations just feel like it is a "instagram gossip" deal rather than being about science.

So, yeah, I'm grateful to Einstein and acknowledge it was an impressive work, but not more than anyone else who has impressive skills.

People who have fallen into that trap are not "average people" who are "victim of social media mechanism": their actions were and are still the result of their choices, and they still have a brain that should allow them to step back and see what they are doing. The fact that they felt into that trap tells us something about their qualities: they are poor analysts and we should not give them much credits (the fact they did decent analyses at first does not exclude the fact that they are poor analysts, just that they managed to get decent results despite being badly equipped for it).

I think (physicists in the room, please correct me if I'm making assumptions here) this is a classic "falsification" trap. Just because you can propose a hypothesis / prediction that is "falsiable" doesn't make it a worthwhile one to pursue. "Hypotheses" are dime a dozen. The art and wisdom is in choosing what to pursue.

I think there is two things: 1. indeed all falsifiable hypothesis are not worth pursuing (for example, the hypothesis of the existence of a teapot in a 1 km2 area on the surface of Mars is technically falsifiable, you can scan and scan the region for it. But it is a poor usage of time and money) 2. some falsifiable hypothesis are really useful, but when the conclusion is "nope", then it looks like we wasted time and money while in fact we did not (and I think it's what the previous comment is saying).

For the LHC, I think it is very very hard to pretend it was a waste of money. Scanning this energy region was a very good move. It was the obvious next low hanging apple. What else could physicists have done that would have been as informative than that for the same amount of money? Sure, we did not find much (well, we found the Higgs boson, which is a huge discovery in itself), so it is "emotionally" disappointing, and "marketingly" bad luck (the public can think it was useless). But the progress of our understanding of how things work increased a lot thanks to it: before it, we just had no idea what was in this region. We had plenty of hypotheses, with no clue which one was better than the other. Now, we still have a lot of hypothesis, but we crossed-out a huge lot of them.

> The art and wisdom is in choosing what to pursue.

Exactly. On this point, I think the choice made with the LHC is hard to beat. What else could have been done instead that will bring the final word on as much unresolved hypotheses? The question is less clear with the future collider, but if it does not win the best position, it will certainly be in the top ones. So I don't think it is fair to say that people who want to build it are misguided, they still have very good arguments.

Thanks for sharing, this is a good additional perspective. I didn’t mean to look at CERN with rose-tinted glasses.

I was trying to convey that I marvel at the achievement of building a machine of this size and complexity. I didn’t mean to say that working conditions are perfect - in the same way as I can marvel at the Taj Mahal but also know that being involved in its construction must have been a horrible experience.

I would argue that a part of the underlying reasons are coming from structural issues within academia / knowledge work in general and, to some degree, fundamental psychological flaws of humans. I have seen versions of what you are describing also in other workplaces. This is not to say that your experiences and observations are invalid - rather, that they are probably not unique to CERN and a broader issue.

(My employer hired many ex CERN researchers for the IT / Data Science team throughout the last years. If you are still in the area, there is a non-negligible probability that we work for the same company.)

https://medium.com/@liboski/the-superconducting-super-collid...

https://weburbanist.com/2014/09/11/the-desertron-worlds-larg...

The landscape is so spacious, I hesitate to call it urb-ex. Rur-ex?

Don’t know if you visited the antiproton decelerator/LEAR but they’re similarly unreal - a vast cavern, half a dozen stories high and so large it fades into blackness beyond the floodlights illuminating the various buildings and experiments within there. You descend in a rickety cage loft surrounded by no more than a box of girders, to be greeted by a vision straight out of sci-fi. Vast lead megaliths tower around like the work of some very precise techno-druids, cables and ducts snake across the floor to join unknown experiments occluded by the henges, and in this place, they make the stuff the universe abhors.

Wild stuff.

Oh, I also got to tool around on Tim’s computer which was just sat in the cafeteria at the time.

It’s just so hard to convey the sheer overwhelming size and complexity of it all - the feeling must have been akin to a mediaeval peasant who has lived their life in a thatched hut seeing a cathedral for the first time. Numinous.

This is spending that makes me proud to be a human and gives me hope for mankind, in similar vein as ie JWST telescope.

And it does not capture the awe when you notice the constant crackling sounds down there. For which, as the tour guide explained to us, nobody knows the root cause, despite bright minds investigating it.

Sadly, I could not find any sources online about this topic.

There should be (not yet officially confirmed) an open days after summer next year, just like there was in 2019. Short time frame but for a few days everything(-ish) is accessible, including going down in the LHC tunnel, but many more crazy places.

In the meantime there are still permanent exhibitions and guided tours for those interested. Come have a look at the cool science (made with your taxes)!