LHC Computing Grid

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The LHC Computing Grid is a distribution network designed by CERN to handle the massive amounts of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It incorporates both private fiber optic cable links and existing high-speed portions of the public Internet.

The data stream from the detectors provides approximately 300GB/sec, which is filtered for "interesting events", resulting in a "raw data" stream of about 300MB/sec. The CERN computer center, considered "Tier 0" of the LHC Computing Grid, has a dedicated 10GB/sec connection to the counting room.[1]

The project is expected to generate 27 TB of raw data per day, plus 10 TB of "event summary data", which represents the output of calculations done by the CPU farm at the CERN data center.[1] This data is sent out from CERN to eleven Tier 1 academic institutions in Europe, Asia, and North America, over dedicated 10GB/sec links. Over 150 Tier 2 institutions are connected to the Tier 1 institutions by general-purpose national research and education networks.[1]

The Tier 1 institutions receive specific subsets of the raw data, for which they serve as a backup repository for CERN. They also perform reprocessing when recalibration is necessary.[1]

Distributed computing resources for analysis by end-user physicists are provided by the Open Science Grid, Enabling Grids for E-sciencE,[1] and LHC@home projects.

The LHC is expected to produce 10-15 petabytes of data each year.[2]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/animations/LHCdata/LHCdata.html
  2. ^ http://www.techworld.com/mobility/features/index.cfm?featureid=4074&pn=2

[edit] External links