The world's most powerful particle accelerator is being constructed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. The accelerator, called the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), will start operation in 2006 and be used as a research tool by four large collaborations of physics researchers, including some 6,000 people from universities and laboratories around the world.
The computational requirements of the experiments that will use the LHC are enormous: 5-8 PetaBytes of data will be generated each year, the analysis of which will require some 10 PetaBytes of disk storage and the equivalent of 200,000 of today's fastest PC processors. Even allowing for the continuing increase in storage densities and processor performance this will be a very large and complex computing system, and about two thirds of the computing capacity will be installed in "regional computing centres" spread across Europe, America and Asia.
The computing facility for LHC will thus be implemented as a global computational grid, with the goal of integrating large geographically distributed computing fabrics into a virtual computing environment. There are challenging problems to be tackled in many areas, including: distributed scientific applications; computational grid middleware, automated computer system management; high performance networking; object database management; security; global grid operations.
The development and prototyping work is being organised as a project that will include many scientific institutes and industrial partners, coordinated by CERN. The project will be integrated with several European national computational grid activities (such as GridPP in the United Kingdom and the INFN Grid in Italy), and it will collaborate closely with other projects involved in advanced grid technology and high performance wide area networking, such as the GEANT, Datagrid and DataTAG projects partially funded by the European Union, and the GriPhyN, Globus, iVDGL and PPDG projects funded in the US by the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy.
CERN openlab for DataGrid applications
The activities at CERN will take place in the context of the CERN openlab for DataGrid applications - a collaboration between CERN and industrial partners to develop data-intensive Grid technologies to be used by the worldwide community of scientists working at the LHC.
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