Fermilab

Operators monitor the status of the central computing system from this control area.

Fermilab's Computing Division pioneered the construction of low-cost computing farms to replace large and expensive specialized systems. Since the 1980s, Fermilab has used low-cost computers – first workstations, now personal PCs – to provide very large amounts of computing power.

Matching the computing needs of particle physics (streaming video, 11 mins.)

To meet the computing needs of the Fermilab Theory Group, the Computing Division built the ACPMAPS supercomputer, a massive parallel computer with a peak performance of 50 giga flops (billion floating point operations per second). Its Linpack benchmark of about 15 GFlops ranks it among the most powerful computers in the world. With the help of this supercomputer, Fermilab scientists were the first to calculate the strong coupling constant, a quantity which describes the strength of the strong force between quarks.

Homepage of Computing Division

The Particle Physics Data Grid