Reporting from EHSM

Particle Collisions

We had a couple of great days in Hamburg, heard talks about interesting topics and met a lot of inspirational people. And we were also given a grand tour of the particle accelerators that we were all so "physically attracted" to :) . DESY's primary task, since the research centre was founded in 1959, has been to investigate the smallest particles known at that time.. Over it's five decade operation history, DESY provided essential information and data for solving some of the most complex puzzles in particle physics. With the PETRA storage ring, researchers discovered the gluon, the glue-particle holding quarks together - without it there would be no atoms. Nowadays, practically all particle physics research is done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN and the DESY facilities have shifted their focus to the so-called "photon science". Ultrafast processes- such as those in a chemical reactions- require incredibly short light pulses for taking pictures at the atomic level - imagine a femto second x-ray flash light. DESY also houses a 14,000 CPU grid, which is one of 140 grid locations permanently crunching through the huge amount of data that is almost constantly captured by the CERN LHC.

AXIOM stories

Above you can watch our presentation at EHSM in full length. Alongside this, all of the other talks are available via youtube on the EHSM channel. We had a number of very interesting discussions and gained a lot of insight on future use-cases for the AXIOM camera. As an example, we learned once again that astronomy has a huge demand for a proper high resolution camera system - like the AXIOM - because all the existing DSLRs lack easy control and, more importantly, the ability to preprocess the data before sending it to storage. We also heard a number of funny stories, and learnt that our April fools video was well received by Allan Alcorn (the inventor of Pong) after he got a message from a scientist we met at EHSM. This scientist told us that she was introduced to Allan at a party in Silicon Valley. A very interesting request, one that we have not considered before, was brought to us by another EHSM visitor: Secure 'One-way' encryption of video/still images of sensitive data captured by journalists and cameramen in war zones - the decryption key stays safely at home. This would be no big deal to implement with AXIOM. Of course, we also had a lot of fun participating in all the talks and events there, from bending glass over electron beam welding to playing with acrobatic robots. Once again, we would like to say thanks to both Sébastien Bourdeauducq and the many other people involved in EHSM for doing such a great job organising this event. A special thanks also goes out to Jürgen Starek for showing us some interesting areas throughout DESY - a very special place hosting this meet-up.

Image Gallery

Read more about our participation in the Exceptional Hardware and Software Meeting (EHSM) at the DESY particle accelerators in Hamburg 2014