Data Acquisition and Analysis in Extremely High Data Rate Experiments

OCT 01, 1996

Although computers will be essential in coping with the petabytes of data generated each year by next‐generation particle physics experiments, perhaps their greatest role will be coordinating the efforts of truly global collaborations of over a thousand researchers.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881524

Joel N. Butler

David R. Quarrie

The goal of elementary particle physics is to unravel the properties of matter at the deepest level—that is, to answer questions such as. What are the basic constituents of matter and how do they interact with each other? The search for the answers to such questions has led us to probe the structure of matter at ever‐smaller length scales—from atomic to nuclear and now subnuclear scales. Investigating very small distance scales (below $10^{−13} cm$ ) has required very high‐energy particles and, consequently, the development of gigantic particle accelerators for producing such particles. (See the box on page 55.) Although these high energy accelerators are marvels of technical and scientific ingenuity, the massive amount of data they produce could not be collected, analyzed and reduced to physics results without another marvel of modern technology: the digital computer!

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More about the Authors

Joel N. Butler. Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois.

David R. Quarrie. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California.