Not much shy of a year after I left, CERN released the animation I researched, scripted, storyboarded, and supervised production of. They’ve polished it up, slowed it down, added a little more text and more blocks in one spot, and made lots of the global stuff prettier, but it’s mostly there.
I was responsible for researching, interviewing, scripting, designing, storyboarding, and directing the animation, which was produced remotely by a 3D production studio in Spain.
If you want to find out about how LHC data is processed, check it out!
Here’s CERN!
The layout of the LHC rings and experiments, with control centres on the surface and the data centre
A collision lights up different kinds of detectors within an experiment.
Incredibly boring stuff is filtered out immediately
Data from all of the individual detectors in the experiment are turned into a single packet
Looking at accepted data and doing a first-pass check to see if it’s actually interesting
Data transferred from the experiments to the datacenter
The CERN data centre is a hugely impressive place…
Data from similar events are grouped together
Data is copied and undergoes initial reconstruction
There are a huge number of centres across the world that hold copies of LHC and other scientific data
Transfer between Datacentres around the globe
Incredible number of processing jobs run on the distributed global Grid