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Felix Ehm, a member of CERN's beams control group, has always had acurious and scientific bent. "What I did when I was a small kid and I wanted to know what wasinside something, was just smash it with a hammer," he told theaudience at the closing address of the CamelOne conference inBoston on Wednesday. ALSO IN HIGH-TECH: DARPA seeks Holy Grail: Quantum-based data security system On a vast scale, that's broadly what CERN's Large Hadron Colliderdoes -- smashing particles together at a whisker short of the speedof light in order to minutely document the results. Running thesupercooled magnets and four gigantic detection arrays -- each ofwhich weighs in at tens of thousands of tons -- in place around thenearly 17-mile-long underground tunnel is, unsurprisingly, afiendishly complex task. According to Ehm, CERN began using open source message broker ActiveMQ as a way to transport data between the85,000 machines and more than 2 million total endpoints at thefacility in 2005. While the team was initially looking only for a free Java messagingsystem, Ehm said that the open-source nature of ActiveMQ hasprovided unlooked-for advantages. Being able to tinker with sourcecode for modification and repair, by itself, has already provedhighly useful. Additionally, the public-spirited nature of CERN dovetails wellwith that of open source. "Any kind of outcome of CERN is public knowledge. There are nosecrets at CERN, everything is public. Anything we develop is forhumankind, basically," he said. The system has to handle a wide variety of different use cases,according to Ehm. One such application runs a critical safetymeasure used to dissipate the enormous amounts of energy producedby the LHC's particle beams -- which could otherwise "easilydestroy the facility," he noted. The 20 or 30 clients in thissystem each must send 2MB per second in order to function properly. While that 60MB per second would ordinarily tax the network to itslimits, Ehm said that the team was able to share the load betweentwo machines for better reliability. Another application -- this one a log monitor designed to collect ahuge number of updates quickly -- handles 4,500 small messages persecond, while routing them to a wide array of endpoints. In total, Ehm told the audience, CERN's open-source messagingframework processes 190 million messages per day, while maintaininga 99.98% uptime figure in 2011. The importance of that high uptime percentage cannot beoveremphasized, according to Ehm. "If there is no [Java messaging system] there is no particlephysics," he said. Given that the JMS controls a magnetic array sopowerful that it takes a month to warm up and another to powerdown, the consequences of downtime can be severe. Ehm said that his team will continue to update the middleware inplace on its systems, noting that a major change -- replacing CORBA(Common Object Request Broker Architecture) with a new product,while keeping JMS where it is -- is scheduled for the end of theyear. Email Jon Gold atand follow him on Twitter at@NWWJonGold. Read more about software in Network World's Software section. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as Swim Goggles Case Manufacturer , China Kids Swim Float Suit for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Silicone Swimming Hat.
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