Computer Science

Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva is the largest scientific instrument on the planet. When it begins operations in 2008, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyse.

Grid computing connects computers that are scattered over a wide geographic area, allowing their computing power to be shared. Just as the World Wide Web enables access to information, computer grids enable access to computing resources. These resources include data storage capacity, processing power, sensors, visualization tools and more. Thus, grids can combine the resources of thousands of different computers to create a massively powerful computing resource, accessible from the comfort of a personal computer and useful for multiple applications, in science, business and beyond.

The mission of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC.

The data from the LHC experiments will be distributed around the globe, according to a four-tiered model. A primary backup will be recorded on tape at CERN, the "Tier-0" centre of LCG. After initial processing, this data will be distributed to a series of Tier-1 centres, large computer centres with sufficient storage capacity and with round-the-clock support for the Grid.

The Tier-1 centres will make data available to Tier-2 centres, each consisting of one or several collaborating computing facilities, which can store sufficient data and provide adequate computing power for specific analysis tasks.

Individual scientists will access these facilities through Tier-3 computing resources, which can consist of local clusters in a University Department or even individual PCs, and which may be allocated to LCG on a regular basis.

The LCG combines the computing resources of more than 140 computing centers in 33 countries, aiming to harness the power of 100,000 computers to process, analyze and store data produced from the LHC, making it equally available to all partners, regardless of their physical location. In 2007, during the lead-up to LHC start-up, the LCG ran 44 million computer programs.
This number is set to double to reach 100 million programs in 2008.

• see CERN


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