Data transfer from CERN to 12 major computing centers during the challenge. |
In a breakthrough for scientific grid computing, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) collaboration officially announced the successful completion of a service challenge that sustained a continuous flow of physics data on a worldwide grid infrastructure at rates of up to one gigabyte per second. The maximum sustained data rates achieved correspond to transferring one DVD's worth of scientific data every five seconds.
The data were transferred from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to 12 major computer centers around the globe. Over 20 other computing facilities were also involved in successful tests of the global grid service for real-time storage, distribution and analysis of particle physics data. The completion of this challenge is a key milestone on the way to establishing the necessary computing infrastructure for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest scientific instrument, scheduled to start operation in 2007.
Commenting on the significance of the results, Jos Engelen, the Chief Scientific Officer of CERN, said "Previously, components of a full grid service have been tested on a limited set of resources, a bit like testing the engines or wings of a plane separately. This latest service challenge was the equivalent of a maiden flight for LHC computing. For the first time, several sites in Asia were also involved in this service challenge, making it truly global in scope. Another first was that real physics data was shipped, stored and processed under conditions similar to those expected when scientists start recording results from the LHC."
The goal of the WLCG is to unite the efforts of established scientific grid infrastructures to provide sufficient computational, storage and network resources to fully exploit the scientific potential of the four major LHC experiments: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. More than 6,000 scientists worldwide will use data from the experiments to study the fundamental properties of subatomic particles and forces, providing insight into the origins of the universe. WLCG will use a range of national and international grid infrastructures, including the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project and the Open Science Grid (OSG), to make some 15 million gigabytes of data each year available to scientists.
During LHC operation, the major computing centers involved in the grid infrastructure, called Tier-1 centers, will collectively store one copy of the data from all four LHC experiments, with a second copy stored at CERN. Much of the data analysis will be carried out by scientists working at over 100 Tier-2 computing facilities in universities and research laboratories in over 30 countries. These scientists will access the data via the worldwide grid infrastructure. Today these computing facilities provide a combined computing power of over 20,000 PCs, and this number is expected to reach 50,000 by the time the LHC is operational. During the recent service challenge, the participating computing centers sustained more than 12,000 concurrent computing jobs.
Kors Bos, WLCG Grid Deployment Board chairman, expressed satisfaction with the recent results. "Not only did we achieve our gigabyte per second goal for this service challenge, but all sites achieved their target data rates and many went well beyond this. The challenge involved interoperation between four different mass storage system technologies and required a big technical push. The staff at all the sites involved deserves credit for putting in the extra effort required."
Read the full CERN press release
e-mail this article
|
