Grid Goes Live

The way we use computing resources in areas ranging from fundamental research to medical diagnosis is about to be revolutionised. The European Particle Physics Laboratory, CERN, birthplace of the World Wide Web, today (September 29th 2003) announced the launch of its first computing Grid, covering twelve countries and three continents.

Grids are a new way of employing computing power that should eventually have as big an impact on society as the web did, by allowing users to access world-wide distributed computing resources from their desktops as easily as local resources., ,CERN's LHC computing Grid (LCG) is designed to handle the unprecedented quantities of data expected from a new experiment being constructed at CERN. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will probe the nature of matter by smashing protons together at high energies. The computational requirements of the LHC experiments are enormous - some 12-14 PetaBytes of data will be generated each year, the equivalent of more than 20 million CDs. Analysing this will require the equivalent of 70,000 of today's fastest PC computers. The goal of the LCG project is to meet these needs by deploying a persistent world-wide computational Grid service, integrating the resources of scientific computing centres spread across Europe, America and Asia into a global virtual computing resource., ,"The Grid enables us to harness the power of scientific computing centres wherever they may be to provide the most powerful computing resource the world has to offer," said Les Robertson, LCG project manager at CERN., ,The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) was the first partner to commit to this project and has provided substantial funding directly to CERN in addition to that spent within the UK research groups. Ian Halliday, PPARC Chief Executive said, "PPARC has strongly supported the LCG project both at CERN and in the United Kingdom. The technology now being deployed for particle physics will ultimately change the way that science and business are undertaken in the years to come. This will have a profound effect on the way society uses information technology, much as the World Wide Web did.", ,The first phase of LCG will operate a series of prototype services; gradually increasing in scale and complexity as our understanding of the functional and operational complexities involved in building a Grid of such unprecedented scale develops. LCG-1, the first of these prototype services, is being deployed now. By using 'middleware' developed mainly by the European Data Grid project and the Globus and related projects contributing to the Virtual Data Toolkit in the US, it allows physicists to access worldwide distributed computing resources from their desktops as if they were local. , ,The LCG-1 system determines what resources and data a job requires, arranges for the job to run anywhere in the world that can provide those resources, including locating and moving the data files required and produced by the job, and eventually returns the results to the physicist. This is the first step on the road towards deployment of the full-scale system that will be required for the LHC.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
CERN,CERN is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, one of the world's most prestigious centres for fundamental research. The laboratory is currently building the Large Hadron Collider. The most ambitious scientific undertaking the world has yet seen, the LHC will collide tiny fragments of matter head on to unravel the fundamental laws of nature. It is due to switch on in 2007 and will be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of science by some 6,000 scientists from universities and laboratories all around the world., ,LCG-1,Institutions participating in LCG at this stage are: CERN; the University of Prague in the Czech Republic; the IN2P3 Computer Centre in Lyon, France; the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany; the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary; the Istituto Nazionale de Fisica Nucleare with its National Computer Centre in Bologna, Italy; the University of Tokyo in Japan; Moscow State University and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia; the Port d'Informació Científica in Barcelona, Spain; the Academia Sinica in Taiwan; CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK and Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the USA.,During the remainder of 2003 the service will be expanded to include many other computer centres in 16 or more countries. This will take place while maintaining a reliable operational environment, and will integrate the resources needed next year for the first of many analysis data challenges that will stress the ability of the Grid to handle the increasingly complex workload of computing and data management required in the build up for LHC.
Future work,Experience with the LCG-1 service will go a long way in providing a prototype solution for other demanding applications in science and industry. Over the next few years the LCG service will form the core of the multi-science grid that will be developed in Europe by the Enabling Grids for E-science and industry in Europe (EGEE) project funded under the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission.,The European DataGrid project is funded by European Union. Its objective is to build the next generation computing infrastructure providing intensive computation and analysis of shared large-scale databases, from hundreds of TeraBytes to PetaBytes, across widely distributed scientific communities. See http://www.eu-datagrid.org,The vision of the EGEE Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (EGEE) is to create and deploy Grid technologies to enable the widespread uptake of e-Science applications throughout the European Research Area. See http://www.cern.ch/egee-ei/2003/,The Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT) is a set of software that supports the needs of the research groups and experiments involved in the US Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) and other projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. See http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/vdt/. VDT includes the Globus toolkit (see http://www.globus.org) and components from the Condor Project (see http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/).
Contacts:
CERN,Renilde Vanden Broeck ,Tel [phone];,E-mail: [e-mail]
PPARC Press Office,Julia Maddock,Tel [phone],E-mail:[e-mail]