GOVERNMENT

Michigan is using 750 miles of fiber optic cable that lassoes its three biggest research universities and Van Andel Institute to help scientists uncover the nature of the Big Bang. The cable connects U.S. physicists to a huge experiment, called ATLAS, in Geneva, Switzerland, at the European Centre for Nuclear Research, (CERN.) Because Michigan institutions have this capability, called MiLR (Michigan Lamda Rail), the University of Michigan and Michigan State University were approved as one of the five university and U.S. laboratory sites in the country to host an ATLAS Tier 2 Computing Center, said Shawn McKee, associate research scientist in physics at U-M and principle investigator of the ATLAS Great Lakes-Tier 2 (AGL-Tier 2) Computing Center. At these Tier 2 Computing Centers, data from the ATLAS experiments at CERN are crunched and analyzed. In this way, the huge amounts of information produced at CERN can be made available to the hundreds of participating scientists around the U.S. “MiLR will allow university researchers to obtain very high-speed (up to 10 gigabits per second) point-to-point connections to national and international points in Chicago,” McKee said. ATLAS is one of the particle detectors in the Large Hadron Collider currently under construction at CERN. This collider is a 17-mile underground track and is scheduled to come online in May 2008. Particles in the collider are accelerated and collide as they speed around the track, and the hope is that the secrets to the Big Bang will be unlocked when data from those collisions is analyzed, said MSU physics professor Raymond Brock, co-director of the AGL-Tier 2 Center. “When it comes to understanding the fundamental constituents that make up the universe, it’s often instructive to look in as well as up for answers," Brock said. "The insides of each proton literally carry the secrets of how the whole universe began. But, revealing those clues means taking the proton apart and the only way to do that is to bang them together at enormous energies created by large particle accelerators.” Analyzing the end products of these collisions often leads scientists to the discovery of both unknown particles and a deeper understanding of how these and other entities are produced and interact with one another. “We expect to see new particles as a result of the ATLAS experiment,” Brock said, “but, ultimately this is all about what happened in the first of the universe. Every time there’s a proton-proton collision in such an accelerator as CERN or Fermilab we’re going back and sampling the conditions which occurred at about a pico-second after the birth of the universe.” Initially, the raw data gathered from ATLAS will be spread out equally among 10 national laboratories. These initial data analysis locations, termed Tier 1 Computing Centers, are located throughout the world. In the U.S., it’s at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Within each national region, additional Tier 2 centers are established to serve the needs of their institutions and all of their national scientists. ATLAS as a whole, has about 1,900 physicists, including some 400 students, participating from more than 164 universities and laboratories in 35 countries. Physicists expect that their research at ATLAS will take them far beyond what the well-tested theories of their field tell them. Forty years ago, physicist Steve Weinberg wrote down the equations that formed the basis of the Standard Model detailing how fundamental particles form and interact. For decades this theory withstood experimental attack. But all along, physicists have known Weinberg’s Standard Model–even though astonishingly accurate–isn’t completely solid. Now, experiments at ATLAS will allow scientists to venture into new territory where the results will yield an evolved model for fundamental particle interactions. This notion is one that hopeful high energy physicists from around the world have held for years. In the foreseeable future, every automobile will connect to a network that feeds it information about safety, directions and more. It will take huge amounts of bandwidth to move that information. In another example, consider that in as little as 20 years, all written human knowledge may be on-line, said John King, professor in the School of Information and vice provost for academic information at U-M.. Eventually, this kind of network capacity will enable students in high school physics classes to actually participate in global experiments, rather than just learning about them from a textbook. "What's exciting is Michigan is one of the few places in the country that is doing this in its own backyard," King said. "It's being there at the beginning, that's the key thing. We have the opportunity to find out first, how it works, what doesn't work, what difference it makes, and how to exploit it." “Use of the Michigan Lambda Rail for research and educational purposes in general facilitates bringing high-end research into Michigan – for example the AGL-Tier 2 center -- which is known to have a large multiplier in terms of total economic benefit,” said David Gift, vice provost, libraries, computing and technology at MSU. The Michigan Lambda Rail can be used by commercial firms with which the research universities have collaborative research and development programs. Use of the high-speed cable to interconnect with other states' education and research networks facilitates inter-state/inter-institutional opportunities that lets Michigan and its residents take advantage of opportunities that are arising in those other states, and could help us to leverage the relatively faster economic recovery that is occurring in surrounding states in the upper Midwest region, Gift said. In 2006 MSU and U-M high energy physics groups partnered together and proposed to become the ATLAS Great Lakes Tier 2 Computing Center. They were approved and together, the two Michigan universities will be major players in the second level of data simulation and analysis making it available to the hundreds of participating scientists from around the U.S. Together, they are building a unified computing center on both campuses which will house almost 3000 PC-equivalent processors and a PetaByte of storage—equivalent to a mile-high stack of CD’s. The high energy physics groups at MSU and the U-M have a long history of working together to study complex scientific questions. But never before have the two groups formally banded together to participate in such a high-level physics research project. A group of about 15 faculty, postdocs, and students from MSU will work closely with a team of 25 scientists and students from U-M on ATLAS data analysis. ATLAS is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation. Participating universities contribute space, equipment, as well as internal support.