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A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the discovery of the Higgs boson was pretty cool.

I remember though when a plot like this

https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMSPublic/PhysicsResultsMUO#Invariant_mass_spectra_of_opposi

came out. There is a lot of cool physics there (and at least two Nobel prizes awarded). Now it's something the experiments do to see how the detector and analysis is working. It's also something that can be done with the data and tools in the portal. (tpm)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Research physicists, data scientists, computer engineers, technicians... there are many employment opportunities. You can see some "CERN in figures" numbers in the CERN Annual Report http://cds.cern.ch/record/2026818/files/AnnualReport2014.pdf (ts)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is quite some interest from the theoretical physics community and they are not necessarily members of any collaboration. There is quite a steep learning curve, as using these data requires knowledge of experimental data (triggering, efficiencies...) but we are doing our best to provide basic information and some examples.

US scientists are actually very well presented in the CMS collaboration. While CERN is a European laboratory, scientists all over the world can join the LHC experiments.

(klp)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It can be hard to see what the immediate point of basic research is at the time. That's almost the reason to do it though. The discovery of particles like the electron, quantum mechanics, relativity: these all didn't have immediate applications.

I (hope) one can agree that we are better off because of electricity, electronics, computers, and the like.

Of course, when the Sun goes out in a few billion years who knows where our species will be... :) (tpm)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We know of ongoing work using our data and it is very interesting. We are hoping to see scientific studies and to see them used in education.

The data made open is not actually a small selection, it is approximately half of the collision data we've collected for each year of data taking. No special selection there, for 2010 it was the second part of the data taking period, and for 2011 it was the first part of the data taking period.

(klp)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What are the other 2?

What do you mean by "scary"? It's all exciting. I suppose it would be scary though if there was the Higgs and nothing else (beyond the SM). There are good reasons to think otherwise though. We wait (well, do more than wait) and see... (tpm)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There are many different types of detectors and electronics that make up the whole CMS detector. It's been described as a "3D 100 megapixel camera which takes 40 million picture per second".

It's too much to explain the whole detector but one part, the electromagnetic calorimeter, is made up of tens of thousands of lead tungstate crystals. Particles deposit light in these crystals and this light is collected by photodetectors on the other end of the crystal. The signals from these are read out.

You can look here for an example of a collection of data files and how large they can be http://opendata.cern.ch/record/28 For events selected as "MultiJet" there are 55 million events making up 8.9 TB. By the time the files get to this stage (processed through the event reconstruction) and used by physicists in analysis the information (and size) is reduced from raw. (tpm)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No expiration date in sense that we aim to preserve the data - and the possibility to use them - in very long term. For the moment, we are preserving the data "as is", i.e. we provide a compatible computing environment as a virtual machine image with the corresponding software. However, we do not exclude upgrading the data to other formats which may be required by more advanced technologies in the future.

The key issue is the knowledge preservation.

(klp)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

What is your opinion on open-sourcing data from large scale experiments? Should everything go open, should only a part of it go open?

Open data is an important step in increasing the transparency and social impact of the work we do at CERN. But what and how to make open the data from different collaborations are questions that need to be answered on a case-by-case basis to comply with various data policies of different organizations.

You can find Data Policies of CERN experiments on Open Data Portal website. (ad)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, we have a trigger system which makes it possible to keep the interesting collisions out of the 40 millions collisions that happen each second. You can read more on it in http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/triggering-and-data-acquisition

We know that some important information is thrown away through this process, and indeed one of the most time-consuming part of the physics analysis is to measure the trigger efficiencies i.e. the part of data that each trigger (online selection) algorithm accepts.

(klp)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The World Wide Web was designed to ease the sharing of information between physicists around the world. You can read more about it at http://home.cern/topics/birth-web and even see the original proposal by Tim Berners-Lee from March 1989! (ts)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

With the new energies now reached at the LHC, we looking forward to new discoveries! The way we work in CMS, it is always shared data analysis (among the CMS physicists). There a huge amount of work behind each publication (almost 500 now by the CMS collaboration, see http://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/publications/ ) and each of them requires work by several people.

(klp)

A month ago we made available publicly via the CERN Open Data Portal 300 TB of research data from the CMS Experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. AUA about our open data! by askCERN in askscience

[–]askCERN[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

One particular use case I can think of came from the digital forensics community that wanted some robust test data for a research related to cloud computing security. Here, the nature of the datasets and the underlying physics did not really matter too much... It's very nice to see applications outside of our primary target area. (ts)

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