Now That's a Big Grid!

The recent launch of the world's biggest computing grid has pushed the concept of "collaboration" to new heights. All in all, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid combines the efforts of more than 140 computer centers from 33 countries--including 15 universities and three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national labs from 11 states in the U.S. alone. A total of more than 7,000 scientists around the world--1,200 from the U.S.--will be analyzing LHC data.

And to what end? To analyze and manage more than 15 Petabytes (or 15 million gigabytes) of data generated annually by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Putting this in context, when the LHC starts running at full speed, it will produce enough data to fill six CDs per second, according to Michael Ernst, director of Brookhaven National Lab's Tier-1 Computing Center.

The LHC at CERN is the largest scientific instrument in the world. When it begins operations, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyze. The mission of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high-energy physics community that will use the LHC.

U.S. contributions to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid are coordinated through the Open Science Grid (OSG), a national computing infrastructure for science. The OSG provides and supports the OSG Software Stack for download and use by administrators and users of the OSG. The OSG software stack relies on the Virtual Data Toolkit. The collaborative workspace (TWiki) pages provide detailed instructions on how to prepare a facility and/or resource and how to download and configure the OSG Software Stack in order to provide or access resources on the OSG.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:40 AM  Permalink