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Hi. My name is Heather Russell.

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I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

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My research centers around discovering

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the fundamental nature of our universe.

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What are we made of at the smallest level?

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The way we do that is by colliding protons

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that is, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms 

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at super, super fast speeds

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at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Now when we collide these protons 

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most of the time nothing interesting happens.

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They're just like balls. 

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They bounce off each other elastically.

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So in order to actually study particle interactions

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we get at the most fundamental level

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we need to collide lots of them.

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And when I mean lots of them

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I mean we collide 

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like 10 billion protons with 10 billion protons

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all bunched super tight together

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40 million times per second.

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Now you can imagine 

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this might give us a lot of data.

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So what we want to do

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is record the output of all of these collisions

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when the interesting things happen

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as frequently as we can

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and then we'll collect a massive dataset to analyze.

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Then when we have all these collisions,

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all of this data,

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and we're not talking about data that can fit on your laptop here.

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We're talking about 

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data that fills data centers,

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more data than Facebook had.

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And then what we do is we need to analyze it.

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So we need a lot of computers,

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a lot of computational power to be able to analyze this.

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And this is where things like massive research clusters come in.

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Can't analyze on your laptop

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but you can send a little job off to the massive research clusters

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and it'll analyze the data and send back the output.

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And that's how we look in these massive datasets

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for new particles like the Higgs boson

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which we discovered in 2012

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or perhaps hints of dark matter particles that explain

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why galaxies aren't rotating at exactly the rates we think they are

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or we see they are.