CERN Computing Centre (and mouse farm) - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

[Music] okay then we're in and this is the Computing Center at CERN I mean really this is the brain of the Large Hadron Collider now it's really loud in here it's not a place where I can easily do interviews or give you a live commentary so I'm recording this afterwards but I just wanted you to see what it looks like and hear what it sounds like when you walk through these kind of little corridors here I can't tell you how hot it is the hot air is just blasting you from both sides it's like being in a little oven and of course it's so loud I mean you can hardly hear yourself think now this is really the heart of what s calls the grid which is a network of computer systems and centers around the world that's used to process the insane amount of data produced by the large hron collider the LHC produces about 600 million particle collisions a second and although they don't keep everything I mean that would be crazy they just keep a tiny 100,000 snapshots per second that's still a fair amount obviously and that means they're storing about well they're storing over 1,000 megabytes per second and it makes its way here to the data center now the data doesn't just need storing it needs processing and that's where the grid comes in this Center is the start of it all and they call it tier zero it's the tier zero Center then there are tiers one you get tier 2s and you get tier 3s and they're scattered all over the world together they allow thousands of physicists to access all this information and more importantly crunch all the data process it make sense of it all and I mean just the tier zero Center here alone does a million jobs a day and it can transfer up to 10 GB of data every second and I mean these are just numbers obviously but when you think about it they're pretty high numbers now as you can see here some of these Banks some of these racks of computers are kept in kind of these glass enclosures I didn't actually ask about that but I'm I'm assuming it's all sealed so that it's more easy to to keep air conditioned and to keep cool cooling this place is just so important and in fact here see these big blue Towers I mean that's part of the air conditioning system I'm pretty sure they told me if if the cooling fails everything gets Switched Off very quickly otherwise they have bit of a meltdown I do love that you sort of have these little keyboards and computers on the end of the racks too I mean I mean it's obvious that you would but it somehow amuses me I'm not sure why I mean I sometimes think the cables behind my computer and television are complicated when I see this place I feel like my head's going to explode [Music] now we've come upstairs the center's actually spread over two floors and here we see the cartridges or tapes that a lot of the information stored on one of the storage units here for the tapes was actually being worked on while I was there so the door was open and I could have a look inside now often when the information on these tapes is accessed there's kind of this robotic sort of uh ARM device type thing that scurries around the racks and pulls out the tapes and whenever I wasn't filming it would go whizzing around doing all this cool stuff but as soon as I started filming it all kind of stopped and I had to wait for ages but I was determined to show you one in action and eventually eventually I managed to get [Music] this you get the idea okay now we've come up to a little sort of room where you can see over the center this is the ground floor part of the center again you can see how high the ceiling is that's actually not a good thing modern data centers actually have low ceilings I think it's cuz it's easier to cool the rooms if the rooms are smaller but this was built at a time when well computers were a lot bigger it's actually in a lot of ways the building in the room's quite outdated for the purpose but they're still using it I think it's certain they prefer spending their money on on new kit rather than new buildings and it's still doing a pretty good job and here's one last thing I want to show you it's actually outside the computer center they call this the CERN animal shelter for computer mice it's a bit of a joke but it's where the uh it's where the computer mice go to retire when they're they're no longer in use is mice the plural or is it Mouse's it must be mice anyway there it is it's a bit of fun now as I said it was remarkably loud in the center so it wasn't really easy to do interviews but I did do interviews with people that work here at the computer center you're going to be able to see them very soon here on computer file Sean who I work with is going to be having all that going through it all editing it together soon so stay tuned for that also while we were at CERN we made a music video for the 60 symbols Channel if you haven't seen that yet go and have a look it was a bit of fun and I also recorded something about the corridor where the worldwide web was developed and that video is already on computer far so you can go and check that out too there's so much to look at thanks for watching this and we hope to see you soon for more videos