Fermilab Open House
Feynman Computing Center
Computing Division

Welcome to the Feynman Computing Center at Fermilab. This building houses many of the larger computing systems at Fermilab as well as those requiring the attention of operators, but there are many other computers at other locations at the laboratory as well. The Computing Center is named after Dr. Richard Phillips Feynman, a Nobel Prize (1965) winning physicist, best known for his Feynman diagrams, many books (including his popular lecture series), and dynamic lecture style as evidenced in his video, "Computers from the Inside Out."

We have a number choices of things for you to do during your visit to Feynman Computing Center -- from a tour of the computing facilities to experiencing for yourself what the World Wide Web has to offer. And especially for the kids, creating your very own Web page.

We hope you will learn: Why do we need so many computers? Where does the data come from? How can you build quarks from bits on a tape?

Posters and displays

The first thing you come across as you enter Feynman is a room with posters and displays related to Computing at Fermilab.

Modern graphics displays help physicists analyze and explain their data.

Fermilab uses large quantities of storage for data. As data grows, the storage media shrinks. We can now store more data in a smaller physical area. The only problem is -- we now collect much more data than we did in the past. Ironically enough, it takes more data to define a smaller particle.

A historical display of media provides background on the changing technology which we use to store more and more data.

If you take the tour of the computer room, you will get to see several robotic mass storage systems (see picture above).

Learn what the World Wide Web has to offer

The World Wide Web was developed at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) to address the needs of high-energy physicists. Fermilab Computing has been involved with the World Wide Web since June of 1992 when Tim Berners-Lee visited Fermilab to tell us about this new tool and help us put up our first Web pages. Click here to visit the Web Tour featured in our Web Room in Feynman on Open House Day.

Create Your Own Web Page

You can create your own Web page to be left on our server (if you wish) for a month. We'll take your picture with a digital camera for taking your picture which you can include on your page.

Mess-up Your Face

Have fun distorting your face! See just how easy it is to manipulate pictures on the computer. Now you know how the fashion magazines make the models look so perfect. Click on Clara's picture to see what she really looks like!

Tour the Computer Rooms

You can take a tour of the computer rooms at Feynman Computing Center. The tour will include demonstrations on how video conferencing and virtual-reality are used in high-energy physics.