CHEP '95 Opening Remarks from
the Co-spokesperson for the CDF Experiment at Fermilab

Bill Carithers

We are a collaboration of 450 physicists from five countries around the world and we are engaged in research using the Fermilab Tevatron Collider, the world's highest energy accelerator. The success of our work requires the best that computing technology has to offer in four key areas:

  1. Data acquistion. We collect information from tens of thousands of electronic channels at speeds challenging the latest switching and decision-making technology;
  2. Real-time data reduction using parallel event processing;
  3. Data storage and retrieval. Immediate access to terabytes of data has become the norm;
  4. Communication of results with our colleagues all over the world. By now electronic mail, video conferencing, and information exchange via the World Wide Web are so ingrained in the way we work that it is hard to imagine surviving without them.

Our experiment has just completed a very successful three year run and the results are being rapidly published thanks to the computing power mentioned above. We are now turning our attention to the next run about three years hence. The data rates, storage and access requirements will be an order of magnitude higher. We are investigating object-oriented programs and other more modern computing techniques to meet the demands.

I wish this conference great success in continuing to expand the horizons advanced computing techniques. We will need and use them.