In June, Miguel Martinez Pedreira, Software engineer at CERN on the ALICE project, and Glauber Costa, VP of Field Engineering at ScyllaDB, teamed up to do a computing seminar to discuss real-time processing of big data with ScyllaDB, examining how ScyllaDB helped the ALICE experiment with their AliEn Global File Catalogue use case.
CERN uses the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The instruments used at CERN are purpose-built particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before the beams collide with each other or with stationary targets. This process that gives physicists insights into the fundamental laws of nature.
One of seven experiments on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) studies the hadrons, electrons, muons and photons produced in the collisions of heavy nuclei. In the process, it creates matter at temperatures that exceed five trillion Kelvins, about 333,000 times hotter than the core of the sun.
The AliEn Global File Catalogue is a metadata index of every single file of the experiment. It spreads across 80 computer centers in five continents. The real-time data is stored from the moment it’s taken in the experiment, and made available for other phases of research.
See CERN and ScyllaDB present their Global File Catalogue use case of real-time processing along with the results of switching from Cassandra to ScyllaDB in the video below. Glauber explains how ScyllaDB enabled CERN to achieve high throughput at predictably low latencies, all while keeping TCOs under tight control.
Watch the video to learn about ScyllaDB’s close-to-the-hardware architecture and how it helped CERN amp up their Global File Catalogue platform. You might also like to watch CERN’s presentation at ScyllaDB Summit 2017, A Future-Proof Global File Catalogue for the ALICE Experiment at CERN.
