A Fresno State physics professor garnered a two-year, $620,000 grant for his work in atom smashing.
Collision testing began in March at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, where physicists a re-creating the Big Bang Theory.
Last year, five students from the California State University (CSU) system worked from the site, which sits in a tunnel 570 feet underground.
Professor Yongsheng Gao’s grant from the National Science Foundation’s Elementary Particle Program will be used to build the Computational Science Center (CSC) on campus, pending approval from the Provost’s office. Gao said the proposal sent to the Provost’s office would include about 100 computers that run a Linux system and a professional Linux administrator.
Gao said the CSC would be used to process the information that comes from the collision testing. The LHC will produce roughly 15 petabytes, or 15 million gigabytes of information annually, according to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
“So, we have to reduce this amount by millions of times without losing new physics,” Gao said.
The amount of information is so great CERN distributes it among 2,000 physicists across the world.
Gao said the process will take advance computing, which is where the CSC comes in.
Founded in 1954, CERN has been attributed for the birth of the World Wide Web, because physicists had to come up with a way to transfer a large amount of information quickly.
“For the past 50 years or so, CERN is leading the effort of great computing,” Gao said.
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), the name for the experiment, ranks the universities involved with a tier system. Gao said of the nine universities involved that receive funding from the National Science Foundation, Fresno State is the only one without a Linux program.
“We are starting from scratch,” Gao said. “So, we need to catch up.”
This year, seven CSU students are planning to work over the summer in Geneva, where they will join 8,000 scientists from around the globe.
Provost William Covino, vice president for academic affairs, said he will be reviewing the proposal for the CSC later this month.
“The Computational Science Center is a very promising concept,” Covino said.
Professor Gao, Covino said, has been very successful in securing external funding, and he is one of the university’s most accomplished new faculty members, especially for his success achieving international distinction in physics.
“Professor Gao’s association with CERN has given Fresno State greater visibility as a significant contributor to scientific research, and increased our opportunities to compete for substantial grant funding in the future,” Covino said.