How to watch the LHC in action
The logs of daily happenings is the best place to start
The CMS team does a great job of logging what is going on under the CMS section on the left is "Latest updates" That is a great place to start and see what has been happening.
The LHC commissioning log is a good second stop to see whats been happening. Thats under LHC and Progress
- LIVE data from the machine -
The LHC is the machine that does the accelerating and colliding.
Page 1 - This is where the action is. It will show the current state of the machine when it is running.. It will also show comments from the operators on what they are doing. It shows the actual power of the beam in GeV or TeV. This page is worth watching at all times. It updates by itself.
Cryo status - This shows the state of the supercooled 17 mile ring of magnets. Green is good, Red is bad and everything stops.
Status Op - This shows a overall status of the machine and all the detectors. It also has a graph of the "luminosity". Thats how "Bright" the beam is.
If collisions are occuring then you can watch live collision data from LHCb under its section and "event display". This page autoupdates when collisions are occuring
Go to the forum new user section for a explanation of the contents of pages
The Detectors..
Each section of my navigation page has similar things for each experiment.
Status - Shows what the detector is doing and if its OK and working. You will just have to play with these.. Great fun
Wiki - Internal and technical info on day to day machine operations and facts
Log Book - This is a E-book they post stuff to as it happens
CMS has CMS TV.. These displays that show various things and change by themselves
Computing
The LHC in operation is gonna require a huge amount of data processing.
LHCOPN - The backbone communication network , the LHC Optical network. 30 Gb/s is a very big number.
Tier 0 - processing jobs in motion. I dont fully understand this, but its important.
The GRID - the worldwide computer network of computers processing the LHC data
CMS TV Ch 11 and 2 - Is all very cool, but I dont know what it all means - pretty graphics, think Hypno toad for geeks..