Superrask bildeprosessor

Tim Berners-Lee jobbet ved CERN da han spesifiserte og laget funksjonaliteten til det som han kalte World Wide Web. Ikke helt uten betydning når det gjelder utbyttelsen av Internett :)

Nå kan kanskje forskningen ved CERN føre til en annen "spin-off", nemlig verdens raskeste bildeprosessor. The Regional Calorimeter Trigger er i stand til å fange bilder av milliarder av protoner som kolliderer hvert sekund.

Foreløpig er det neppe noe for kompakt-kameraene dette, men kanskje peker det mot fremtidens high-speed- kameraer?

Because the amount of data that could be collected is so vast, with images arriving every 25 nanoseconds (a nanosecond is a billionth of a second), the system needs to perform serious triage to decide to save or discard an event, says Wesley H. Smith, a professor of physics.

"Besides the huge amount of digital information processed, what is also interesting is that the billions of collisions not selected by this device are lost forever," says Smith. "There is little room for error and no room for recovery."
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The Regional Calorimeter Trigger will be capable of processing 4 trillion bits of information per second, in essence taking ?a picture of the structure of the collisions 40 million times per second,? says Klabbers, who has been working to build the device at UW-Madison with 20 other people for the past five and a half years.

The Regional Calorimeter Trigger is composed mostly of custom-designed and built circuit boards integrated into crate-like structures that will be in a series of racks 8 to 9 feet tall. The components are scheduled to be shipped to Geneva in June and should be up and running by the end of 2006 in anticipation of the LHC?s first experiments planned for 2007.

World?s fastest image processor aids search for elusive form of matter.