News

posted on 24 April 2008 13:35

Hadron collision data from CERN will come to the UK to be stored and processed on a Grid Particle Physics (GridPP) computing and storage infrastructure.

Over the last six years, the GridPP collaboration has successfully built a distributed UK-wide computer system for scientists working on the world's biggest experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), has extended the UK part of this project for another three years.

GridPP is part of a world-wide grid for the CERN project. Without it the LHC experimental data would be stuck in Geneva.

The LHC, currently in the final stages of commissioning at CERN, will collide sub-atomic particles inside cathedral-sized detectors, searching for clues as to how atoms are built and how the universe works at a fundamental level, particularly with regard to the elusive Higg's Boson particle.

It will generate probably the largest-ever data flow from one source in the history of the world - 15 petabytes a year. Thousands of scientists across Europe and the world need to divvy up the work to analyze this digital Niagara of data. It has to be distributed to them across a high-speed network, parallel to the Internet.

All the computers and networks involved in this effort form the world’s largest scientific computing grid, a massive co-ordination of over 50,000 CPUs in 50 countries, creating a virtual supercomputer

The UK component of this is GridPP and it will have to deal with a mere (!) 700TB of LHC data, using 10,000 CPUs at 15 sites.

The LHC is scheduled to start in July. GridPP grid has already been helping scientists run simulations to prepare for the LHC, running over 7 million computer programs in 2007. Hopefully it means that its opening won't be like Heatherow's Terminal 5 with digital baggage getting lost.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}