From: hallam@zeus02.desy.de (Phillip M. Hallam-Baker)
Subject: Re: SuperCollider "For" or "Against"
Reply-To: hallam@zeus02.desy.de
Organization: DESY ZEUS Central Data Acquisition
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1992 11:01:51 GMT

Summary:

Mr Tice arguing from a single magazine article from two year ago
attempts to argue with a Postdoctoral research fellow in the field.
Readers may wish to savour the final paragraph from Mr Tice.


In article <01GMRRB8AWJK001E2U@utarlg.uta.edu>, B645ZAW@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
(Stephen Tice) writes:

|>{ talk.politics.misc, Re: SuperCollider: "For" or "Against" }
|>
|>(hallam@zeus02.desy.de on 7-24), Phillip M. Hallam-Baker doubted...
|>}
|>}In article, B645ZAW@UTARLG.UTA.EDU (Stephen Tice) writes:
|>}
|>} |>What they aren't saying in the Dallas Morning News is that it
|>} |>cost about $8 billion to construct the SSC over 8 years, that
|>} |>it has about a 25 year projected lifespan and that it will
|>} |>take about a billion dollars a year to run.
|>}
|>}Thats because it's not true.
|>
|>If not then the folks who are trying to sell it as a great boon to
|>Texas sure have misfigured.
|>
|>The estimates cited are those which come from projections by the
|>business school at the University of Texas at Arlington. In a seminar
|>I attended they also cited a 2.8 times multiplier to give a 70 billion
|>dollar economic stimulus to the North Texas economy, during the SSC's
|>projected 25 year lifespan.

To my knowlege there have been no contacts from the Business school with
either major collider in Europe. I am fairly infamous for going round
telling the Physicists that they need to get other groups involved from
other disciplines. There are a lot of people who would love to
demonstrate an area where they are having such consultations.

I'll even make an offer, I can put them in touch with people who can
give them actual experience of budgeting for such things. We would gain
as well because expert views on general costing methods would be useful
to us, just as specific experience and facts would be useful to them.


|>}The SSC is merely a scaled up version of HERA. Our running costs here
|>}are nothing like the original design and development costs.
|>}
|>}Cost of building HERA, ZEUS and H1 was arround $1 billion
|>}
|>}Running costs are mainly the electricity bill and cost of personel. The
|>}personel are mainly free (grad students, they even pay to work!). Just
|>}got an estimate of 2 million DM for the fixed running costs, or $1 million.
|>
|>Interesting that you would leave out *operations and maintenance* cost,
|>and are you using superconducting magnets?

Yes, we have to, the electricity bill would be too high otherwise. The
HERA ring is the first of it's type to use superconducting magnets for a
proton ring. Our ring has a 6.3 Km circumference. You can scale up the
costs from that.


|>
|>About electricity though...
|>
|>The Nation, (3-19-90) "SUPER COLLIDER -- SUPER BUST" by Gayle Hudgins.
|>
|>    Low utility rates may soon be history too, because the
|>    S.S.C. has arranged to have its huge appetite for electricity
|>    subsidized...   Not only does the collider's hunger for
|>    electricity provide a rationale for an otherwise unnecessary
|>    nuclear power plant [speaking of Comanche Peak], the subsidy
|>    means that rate payers -- rich and poor alike -- will pay six
|>    to to eight times more more than the S.S.C. per kilowatt-hour.

This is quite usual. All the big colliders get huge discounts. This is
because we do not run during the winter when power is it's most
valuable. In effect we only take from the running costs, not the cost of
producing capacity. The 6-8 times reduction sounds too large though.

The same sorts of deals get made by industries such as brine
electrolysis (Chlorine/ Bleach production) and aluminium smelting.


|>Guess who get's to pay for that subsidy. Makes me wonder just how much
|>energy a 20 trillion electron volt particle accelerator -- with 54
|>miles of superconducting magnets can gobble up anyway.

An electron volt ain't exactly a vast amount of energy. There ain't
going to be a large amount of matter circulating at that speed. Rather
less energy than a frieght train.


|>Now for more doubt:
|>}Estimated lifespan of 25 years sounds rather long...
|>
|>}I can't see how anyone would want to do a 25 year run...
|>
|>And I would have thought with all your cynicism PHB that the obvious
|>answer would be "money." First, I'll give a handy abstract, and then
|>another comment from The Nation...
|>
|>American Demographics, (Sept 1989 v11 n9 p62) by John Maines
|>
|>    A Texas-sized jolt: a $6 billion atom smasher may fill this
|>    prairie town with people. (Maypearl, Texas) (the local
|>    impact of the proposed Superconducting Super Collider)

Yep, looks like Witchahachie is going to end being a dry county before
too long.

|>    Abstract: The US Department of Energy (DOE) is planning to
|>    construct the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in the
|>    vicinity of Waxahachie and Maypearl, Texas, 40 miles south
|>    of Dallas. The DOE estimates that the building of the SSC
|>    will generate 9,650 construction-related jobs; generate
|>    annual sales of approximately $446 million during
|>    construction and $268 million during operation; and create
|>    6,500 jobs over the 25 year operational life-span of the
|>                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|>    SSC. Land speculation in anticipation of the 1991
|>    groundbreaking has begun, and land prices are now 150%
|>    higher than pre-SSC prices.

There is a distinction between the SSC and the lab. The SSC is a single
experiment. The labs have other functions including joint partnerships
with industry. Just as CERN has continued after the initial experiment
closed the SSC labs are likely to continue. 

However this is merely because the US needs government research
establishments. I hope that the focus of this research is going to be
much broader than narrow particle physics. There are many groups who are
interested in trying out high tech in a challenging environment. My own
sponsors, the Digital Equipment Corporation paid me for three years to
carry out some very esoteric research into Category Theory and apply it
to particle physics. The result is that I now have a handle on some very
general problems and a rather clearer idea of how to apply formal
methods of computing.

It dosen't take government money (or rather not much) to do this sort of
research. It is not that hard to get money from industry to do this sort
of stuff.



|>The Nation, (3-19-90) "SUPER COLLIDER -- SUPER BUST" p. 383
|>
|>    ...Incredibly, the multibillion-dollar project would be
|>    decommissioned in only twenty years because the metal,
|>    concrete and other materials in the tunnel would become
|>    so radioactive from bombardment by neutrons released during
|>    experiments that the Superconducting Super Collider could
|>    no longer be used.

Err, excuse me, since when has `the nation' been a reputable academic
journal? I think that they are confusing the detectors which are built
with a 20 year lifespan in mind rather than the tunnel. Most of the
radiation is oging to occur at the interaction point. However I can't
see anyone wanting to run GEM or SDC for more than twenty years.

One of the reasons the detectors will degrade is that the calorimeter
scintilators `age'. Typicaly a calorimeter consists of layers of plastic
sandwiched between layers of iron. Particles passing through the plastic
make small flashes of light which are used to gain a measure of the
energy of the particle producing them. Radiation makes the scintilator
turn opaque. So after some time you need to replace the scintilator.
This is not a disaster though. It merely means taking the detector apart
and putting it back together. I can guarantee that this will have to
happen at least once in twenty years!

Another reason is that the silicon chips are going to fail. This is one
reason why the SSC people are putting a lot of effort into radiation
hard chip design. Since the main cost of Silicon is the original design,
complete replacement of the electronics after twenty years is not going
to be a major concern.


|>And the author goes on for another page about radioactivity problems
|>such as "vac-ion pump oil" irradiation and disposal and "beam loss"
|>incidents, though no mention is made about building up exotic metals.

Yep, there are a lot of engineering challenges. A bit like there were in
putting a man on the moon.

|>The Nation, (3-19-90) "SUPER COLLIDER -- SUPER BUST" p. 382

Note the date! Tice has based his entire case on ONE issue of ONE
magazine which is TWO years out of date.


|>    D. Allan Brumley, President Bush's science adviser [sic], is
|>    not even sure the United States has the industrial capacity
|>    to build the mammouth magnets for the S.S.C.

Tough, we have already started taking delivery of them. A streach is to
be demonstrated at the Texas conference later this year.


|>Quite a formidable data handling problem arises as well, I think
|>the figure being bandied around is that the SSC will generate data
|>at the rate of a Terabyte per nanosecond.

What!

Nope the SSC is working at 60MHz with 1-2 Mb per event. This is 60 Tb
per SECOND.

These figures are from Monte Carlo studies of the SDC detector, they are
rather better than the figures `bandied about'

Most of the stuff just goes down the beampipe.

|>It would take really major
|>advances in computer technology to deal with all that, so the
|>computer systems and software R&D is another one of the spin-offs
|>being paraded around as a reason to fund the project. 

Well here you are entering MY area of expertise. Some facts about the
ZEUS experiment at HERA:

1 Beam Crossing interval	96 ns.
2 Raw data per event	200 Kb

So we have a data rate of 0.2 Tb /sec. This is sustained for runs of up
to 10 hours.

ZEUS is already coping with the 96 ns beam crossing interval with two
major parts of it's electronics system still to be comissionned. This
will occur later this year once the data from the preliminary runs has
been analysed. Based on the results of the ZEUS experiment I am totaly
confident that the projected data rates for the SSC are entirely
achievable using technology which exists today. And that it will be
possible to achieve within the budget set out using the technology
avaliable when it starts.

I can go into this in quite some detail if you like and explain exactly
how I would propose to deal with the SSC rate. Suffice to say that I
have had a paper accepted for the Computing in High Energy Physics
conference later this year in which I will outline a method of software
construction which I have proven at ZEUS and believe can meet the
requirements of both the SSC and LHC.

BTW: Technical disclaimer, to those in the field: yes I know that there
are features of this comparison which are not entirely realistic,
specificaly the difference between e-p and p-p physics. However
feasibility proofs for the trigger/DAQ do exist. 

|>It's foolish PHB to make a factual statement that can't be supported
|>on a public, and indeed international, academic network. 

Yep, sure is.

|>I reckon
|>my reputation for dealing in fact is quite considerably firmer
|>than yours. Would you now care to attempt a real rebuttal of my 
|>assertions about the costs of the SSC?

You are arguing with someone who actualy works in the area using data
from a magazine which is two years out of date.
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