The Large Hadron Collider, which you may know for its work colliding hadrons over at the CERN laboratory, has found a reinvigorated taste for graphics cards.
As CERN explained in a recent announcement, the researchers at the big-ol' LHC have experimented with GPU power before, with key advancements in online reconstruction arriving as recently as last October, and they're now looking to more directly integrate graphics cards to support their data processing.
Using GPUs in supporting servers dramatically improves data flow in experiments like this. Apparently. For example, CERN estimates that without GPUs, it would need "about eight times as many servers" to handle the sheer quantity of data pouring in from the LHC's upgraded ALICE detector, which tops out around 3.5 terabytes per second.
In 2022, the LHCb – which studies the "beauty" or "b" quark, and no we're not making any of this up – is projected to generate over four terabytes of data per second, and "instead of offloading work, it will analyze the full 30 million particle-bunch crossings per second on GPUs."
Intel says it's working to address the ongoing GPU crisis.
