When upgrades to the X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are complete, the powerful new machine will capture up to 1 terabyte of data per second; that’s a data rate equivalent to streaming about one thousand full-length movies in just a single second, and analyzing every frame of each movie as they zoom past in this super-fast-forward mode.
Data experts at the lab are finding ways to handle this massive amount of information as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) upgrades come on line over the next several years.
LCLS accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light to generate extremely bright beams of X-rays. Those X-rays probe a sample such as a protein or a quantum material, and a detector captures a series of images that reveal the atomic motion of the sample in real time. By stringing together these images, chemists, biologists, and materials scientists can create molecular movies of events like how plants absorb sunlight, or how our drugs help fight disease.
Read more on the SLAC website
Image: Data rate comparisons
Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory