BaBar data preserved in 'computational cocoon' for future analysis
Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - 07:32
in Mathematics & Economics
More than eight years worth of pristine particle physics data will remain available for analysis or re-analysis at least until 2018, now that BaBar's Long Term Data Access project is complete. The project preserves a complete set of BaBar data all 530-plus inverse femtobarns of it by, in a sense, stopping time for it, embedding it in a computational cocoon safe from upgrades, bug fixes and patches. Anything that could disrupt the computing environment where the data is housed is carefully kept out by a clever arrangement of servers, software and networked virtual machines.