Life as a Physicist

I was looking at some predictions for the size of the Trigger Processing farm for ATLAS. This farm is basically racks and racks of computers that will decide, in real time, if the data should be kept or discarded as it rolls off the ATLAS detector.

Back in 2003 (see powerpoint slides, page 23, for example) we were predicting that the computer industry would be making 8 GHz processors by now. Of course, due to power and heat problems, we are now sitting around 3 GHz, but with many cores.

Ahhh.. the good old days!