First phase of CERN Grid project launched
The first phase of the Grid computing project was approved at an extraordinary meeting of the CERN (European organisation for nuclear research) Council on 20 September 2001. CERN will need a thousand times more computing power than it currently uses to work on the unprecedented avalanche of data that will be produced by experiments at its new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC accelerator will provide particle collisions at higher energies and frequencies than ever before, and computing will be the key to analysing the vast amount of information from these experiments. From 2006, four giant detectors observing trillions of elementary particle collisions at the LHC will accumulate over ten million Gigabytes of data - equivalent to the contents of about 20 million CD-ROMs - each year of its operation. Nearly ten thousand scientists at hundreds of universities around the world will group in virtual communities to comb the data, searching for new physics information. CERN and its international partners hope to use the worldwide, interconnected Grid network of tens of thousands of computers to analyse and store that data. The LHC Grid project has two phases. From 2002-2004, the prototype equipment and techniques necessary for the data-intensive computing will be developed. From 2005-2007, the final working version of the LHC computing Grid will be constructed. Phase 1 of the project will be financed by contributions from CERN's Member States and industrial sponsors. Over 50 positions for young IT professionals will be created during this phase. Significant investments in the Grid project are being made by LHC programme participants around the world, particularly Europe, the USA and Japan. The three-year Grid project, headed by CERN, was awarded 9.8 million euro of funding by the information society programme of the current Framework programme in December 2000. The project aims to create a new worldwide data and computational grid for scientific exploration by sharing large scale databases across a wide range of scientific communities. These resources will be connected through a high speed network 'glue' called 'middleware.' The grid will take the concept of the world wide web to a whole new level, providing scientists around the world with access to shared databases of unprecedented size.