Few chief information officers could claim to have helped recreate the big bang while at work.
But as head of IT at Cern, Wolfgang von Rueden plays a key role in the nuclear-research lab's quest to unravel the nature of the universe by colliding particles at 99 percent of the speed of light.
Von Rueden and his team provide the computing backbone that supports the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator's hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson — dubbed 'the God particle' — invisible 'dark' matter and even evidence of extra dimensions.
Having joined the lab in Geneva in 1975, von Rueden has enjoyed a varied career, working on data-acquisition and processing systems for the particle accelerators that preceded the LHC, before becoming head of the IT department at the beginning of 2003.
The department looks after the base infrastructure at Cern and runs its main computing centre that will process petabytes of data from the LHC and helps co-ordinate and develop the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, a global network of 100,000 processors that will make sense of the reams of data that the LHC produces.
ZDNet.co.uk sister site silicon.com recently spoke with von Rueden about his day-to-day duties, the current economic woes and the biggest misconceptions about Cern.
Q: What are your responsibilities at Cern?
A: The control system used for the accelerators are run by the accelerator departments, but we provide base infrastructure to everybody, including email, databases, networking, desktop support, web services and more.
What is the best thing about your job?
I like developing new ideas and trying to make the almost impossible possible.
I have been here now for 34 years and I have not ever had a dull day.
I've always enjoyed it and love to come into Cern. It's fun even when it's long working hours and tiring. We do it because we like what we do.
We have many people on short-term contracts and it's very hard sometimes when people don't want to leave. We don't have problems finding people to work here.
What difficulties lie ahead for Cern's computing backbone?
The problem is getting enough electrical power, as the computers need more and more electricity. We will run out of steam in about two years' time in the current Cern Computer Centre and are planning a new datacentre to keep up with the demand.
That is the same problem at all of our grid centres around the world: they all have got to look at how they can cut power usage by looking at new technologies, green IT and so on. It's doable; it's just a case of funding.
How much power we will need depends on how much data is coming out of the LHC. 2009 is going to be a very interesting year.
Do you think it will be possible to fund the Large Hadron Collider experiment in the current financial climate?
I believe that it's wrong when you have a short fluctuation in the economy to slow down in investing in technology.
I think you have to do the opposite. When times are bad, you have to invest in fundamental science and education and pushing forward because that is going to get you the results you need to make things better and cheaper.
How will Cern and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid benefit wider society?
As well as the work we do with business on Cern Openlab, there are a large number of different applications that [the grid is] being used for already today.
Of the different computing centres in the grid, several of them support multiple sciences, such as biomedical applications, earth sciences and astrophysics. They are not just supporting particle physics.
It's more a case of the communities using grid computing as they have a need for it. As particle accelerators got more and more complicated, our community was forced to work together on the same project, rather than build separate accelerators.
What's the most ridiculous thing you've heard about Cern?
There was this hype about the grid replacing the entire internet. It was nonsense; it was just not true. We use standard products. We are not revolutionising technology. This was completely untrue.
Take the stories about black holes — also, rubbish. Take the stories about the hacking incident — what was reported was complete nonsense.
I am not that happy about the way that some journalists pick up something that is utter nonsense and you can guarantee a few hours later that it will be copied by other journalists.
I have just stopped reading the reports altogether.
Talkback
Man's technology has exceeded his grasp. - 'The World is not Enough'
September 24, 2008 - 'LHC on hold until spring of 2009' - PhysicsWorld.com: "The magnet failure last week at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) means that the accelerator will not be up and running again until early spring of 2009, say officials at CERN. To keep the project on schedule, the team running the accelerator near Geneva have decided to skip a planned test run at an intermediate energy and re-start the LHC in 2009 at the full beam energy of 7 TeV.") And begin creating Black Holes.
Zealous, jealous, Nobel Prize hungry Physicists are racing each other and stopping at nothing to try to find the supposed 'Higgs Boson'(aka God) Particle, among others, and are risking nothing less than the annihilation of the Earth and all Life in endless experiments hoping to prove a theory when urgent tangible problems face the planet. The European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) new Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is the world's most powerful atom smasher that will soon be firing groups of billions of heavy subatomic particles at each other at nearly the speed of light to create Miniature Big Bangs producing Micro Black Holes, Strangelets, AntiMatter and other potentially cataclysmic phenomena.
Particle physicists have run out of ideas and are at a dead end forcing them to take reckless chances with more and more powerful and costly machines to create new and never-seen-before, unstable and unknown matter while Astrophysicists, on the other hand, are advancing science and knowledge on a daily basis making new discoveries in these same areas by observing the universe, not experimenting with it and with your life.
The LHC is a dangerous gamble as CERN physicist Alvaro De Rújula in the BBC LHC documentary, 'The Six Billion Dollar Experiment', incredibly admits quote, "Will we find the Higgs particle at the LHC? That, of course, is the question. And the answer is, science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing." And CERN spokesmodel Brian Cox follows with this stunning quote, "the LHC is certainly, by far, the biggest jump into the unknown."
The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states: "There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions,..." Again, this is because they truly don't know what's going to happen. They are experimenting with forces they don't understand to obtain results they can't comprehend. If you think like most people do that 'They must know what they're doing' you could not be more wrong. Some people think similarly about medical Dr.s but consider this by way of comparison and example from JAMA: "A recent Institute of Medicine report quoted rates estimating that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year in US hospitals." The second part of the CERN quote reads "...but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator,..." A molecularly changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads "...as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe." These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely more questions than answers but there isn't a particle physicist alive who wouldn't gladly trade his life to glimpse the "God particle", and sacrifice the rest of us with him. Reason and common sense will tell you that the risks far outweigh any potential(as CERN physicists themselves say) benefits.
This quote from National Geographic, "The hunt for the God particle", exactly sums this "science" up: "If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That's the essence of experimental particle physics: "You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out." Read about the "other stuff" below:
http://www.SaneScience.org
http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/anon6.htm
http://www.LHCFacts.org/
http://www.LHCDefense.org/
http://www.LHCConcerns.com/
Popular Mechanics - "World's Biggest Science Project Aims to Unlock 'God Particle'" - http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/extreme_machines/4216588.html"