1985: First Computing in High Energy Physics (CHEP) conference is held in Amsterdam.
1991 or 1992: I encounter the World Wide Web for the first time. There is no graphical browser for it yet, so I am underwhelmed and not sure what it would ever be good for.
1998: CHEP to be held in Chicago. First time I had heard of the conference, and the thought that popped into my head was, “shoot me if I ever go to that.”
2005: I start to work on computing for the CMS experiment at the LHC.
2007: I attend CHEP in Victoria, Canada. No one shot me.
Last week: 19th CHEP held in New York City, and I was there. There were five hundred people registered, all eager to talk about the latest advances and future directions in software and computing for particle and nuclear physics, and also to explore one of the world’s great cities. (As a native of the New York area, I was happy to play tour guide, although I didn’t expect that I’d end up escorting 17 people to Katz’s over the course of four days.) It was a good opportunity to think about the impact that advances in computing have made on physics.
It’s worth looking at the keynote talk by Glen Crawford of the Department of Energy, who described the role of computing as a key enabling technology for our field. Here is a slide of his that I particularly liked:
On the right is what has become the meme (I guess) that we have been using in the US to illustrate how we need the interplay of scientific explorations in three scientific frontiers — energy, intensity, and cosmic — to understand critical problems in particle physics. But I hadn’t previously seen the diagram in the lower left, which shows the required interplay of advanced technologies to achieve these goals. (It certainly hadn’t occurred to me to put computing on the same footing as, say, the LHC accelerator itself.) Glen goes on to describe how particle physics has long been an early adopter of computing technologies, from networks to grids to the World Wide Web (yes, invented by particle physicists). And, in turn, these technologies have been absolutely necessary to handle the huge amounts of data produced by particle-physics experiments that need to be shared among thousands of researchers all over the world.
Other items that caught my attention:
2013: Next CHEP to be held in Amsterdam. Having survived this one without undue violence, maybe I’ll go to that one too. It will be interesting to see which predictions of this CHEP will have come true by then!
Hello !!
One fine day in 1985 I am busily working away at RSX-11 internals when a super-tekkie comes into my lab with an IBM PC dumps it on the floor and says “this is DOS, ‘with windows’ ”
Anyway I get up and take a look at the thing, I am not sure what I am supposed to be looking at (!) , there are these four colored thingys jumping about all over the screen “and I can do this and this this” whenever he clicks the mouse, but why why why ? , and I decide it’s not worth a roll of paper tape !!
1986 and somebody shows me a graphical workstation how to draw a circle, “but I want to draw an ellipse”, “it can only do circles” and they all wonder why I would want to draw an ellipse …
Ken: I enjoy reading your blogs! This blog is an interesting sample that pushes blue buttons in our memories of 1st appearance of DOS, WINDOWS 1, Bill Gates first MS DOS Fortran Compiler, 5″ diskettes, heavy to carry IBM desktop computers with 25KHz memory speed, and 500KB – 1MB hard disk space…
It was time to learn to backup your work, because DOS and fortran compilers were unreliable software that kept ealing our work. So we saved on flopies 5″ diskettes almost after every programming statement we write. lost manny hrs of work especially with 1st BASIC programming language by MS… I was back then at VA TECH, at the mechanical labs 1985-86 optimizing the F15 Fuselage with IBM UNIX graphics CADAM software and CATIA, few lines of finite element equations.
In 1986-1990, fortran boomed, C programming matured, IBM 30/70 and 90 mainframes quickly jumped to supercomputing speed of 50Billion instructions /sec and Gates Windows were starting to settle in the horizon. But UNIX AIX (IBM), HP-UX, SOLARIS of Sun microsystems, BSD (Berkely), IRIX of Silicon Graphics jumpstarted the computing environment.
The period between 1985-1997 has changed the world by the new powerful never expected to be reckoned computing software, machines, and standards. OO structured programming in C++ and later JAVA and J2EE has turned upside down the world of computing, world of technologies, etc. where every application thought to be impossible before that era, was being implemented ingeniously on fast software, on faster computer memory, and on the fastest CPUs.
KEN: Thank you for making us remember and live back those great to remember moments and days in history that really changed our world.
[...] overview of the massive data challenges that the worlds largest scientific experiment faces, and this blog post describes how the frontiers of computing and of science affect each [...]