LHC's New Milestone

The LHC is being installed in a tunnel 27 km in circumference, buried 50-175 m below ground. It's located between the Jura mountain range in France and Lake Geneva in Switzerland (photo courtsey CERN)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid is the world's largest scientific computing grid. The LHC is expected to produce 15 million Gigabytes of data per year, once it is operational in 2007 when it will investigate collisions of Hadron paricles (massive ones among elementary particles, e.g. proton, neutron,..) in order to understand basic laws of Physics. Collecting and storing those data will clearly be a mammoth task.

Recently the worldwide LHC Computing Grid collaboration has completed a service challenge - sustaining a continuous flow of physics data on a worldwide Grid infrastructure at up to 1GB/s. This corresponds to transferring a DVD worth of scientific data from CERN every five seconds.

The data was transferred from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, to 12 major computer centres around the globe. More than 20 other computing facilities were also involved in successful tests of a global Grid service for storage, distribution and analysis of this data in real-time. The completion of this service challenge is a key milestone on the way to establishing the necessary computing infrastructure for the LHC - the world's largest scientific instrument, which is scheduled to begin operations in 2007.

The result of the service challenge was announced at the international Computing for High Energy and Nuclear Physics 2006 conference in Mumbai, India. The next challenge, due to start in the summer, will extend to many other computing centres and aim at continuous, stable operations. That challenge will allow many of the scientists involved to refine their computing models for handling and analysing the data from the LHC experiments, in anticipation of the start of real data taking in 2007.

For more details visit CERN website.