WLCG Service Report [email protected] ~~~ WLCG Management Board, 7 th April 2009.
Where does the data come from? What else does the WLCG do?
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What else does the WLCG do? The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid is the world’s largest computing grid. Lessons learned in managing, administering, securing and linking up on this global scale have driven innovation in computing grids all over the world, changing the way science is done. This intensive collaboration means that Grids are being used in the fight against disease, climate change, air pollution and more. Any science that requires intensive simulation or calculation can benefit from grid computing. The computing centres providing resources for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid are also active in other grids, in particular Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) in Europe and Open Science Grid (OSG) in the United States, but also national and regional grid structures such as GridPP in the UK, INFN Grid in Italy and NorduGrid in the Nordic countries. Where does the data come from? The LHC accelerator creates extremely high energy particle collisions, which in turn create new particles that decay in very complex ways as they move through the detectors. The detectors register the passage of these particles with a vast number of sensors and, finally, a digitised summary of this is recorded as what we call an “event”. The volume of data produced at the LHC will be hundreds of times greater than in previous accelerators. This is because the detectors of the experiments have many more sensors, the “events” that they record at the LHC’s energy scale are much more complex, and the rate at which interesting events occur is much higher. With more than 8,000 LHC physicists across the four main experiments - ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb - actively analysing the data, a lot of computing power is also needed. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. Harnessing computing networks across the world to provide a single massive virtual resource. The computing system designed to do this, the WLCG, has to be very flexible – able to develop smoothly over a period of at least ten years, during which we would be continually adding capacity, improving performance, and absorbing new computing technologies, while striving always to maintain excellent access to the data. Worldwide LHC Computing Grid lcg.offi[email protected] www.cern.ch/lcg
Transcript of Where does the data come from? What else does the WLCG do?
What else does the WLCG do?The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid is the world’s largest computing grid.
Lessons learned in managing, administering, securing and linking up on this global scale have driven innovation in computing grids all over the world, changing the way science is done. This intensive collaboration means that Grids are being used in the fight against disease, climate change, air pollution and more. Any science that requires intensive simulation or calculation can benefit from grid computing.
The computing centres providing resources for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid are also active in other grids, in particular Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) in Europe and Open Science Grid (OSG) in the United States, but also national and regional grid structures such as GridPP in the UK, INFN Grid in Italy and NorduGrid in the Nordic countries.
Where does the data come from?
The LHC accelerator creates extremely high energy particle collisions, which in turn create new particles that decay in very complex ways as they move through the detectors. The detectors register the passage of these particles with a vast number of sensors and, finally, a digitised summary of this is recorded as what we call an “event”.
The volume of data produced at the LHC will be hundreds of times greater than in previous accelerators. This is because the detectors of the experiments have many more sensors, the “events” that they record at the LHC’s energy scale are much more complex, and the rate at which interesting events occur is much higher.
With more than 8,000 LHC physicists across the four main experiments - ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb - actively analysing the data, a lot of computing power is also needed.
The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.Harnessing computing networks across the world to provide a single massive virtual resource.
The computing system designed to do this, the WLCG, has to be very flexible – able to develop smoothly over a period of at least ten years, during which we would be continually adding capacity, improving performance, and absorbing new computing technologies, while striving always to maintain excellent access to the data.
Worldwide LHC Computing Grid
WORLDWIDE
LARGE HADRON COLLIDER
COMPUTING
GRID
Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) in a Nutshell
Then…In 1999, the “LHC Computing Grid” was merely a concept on the drawing board for a computing system to store, process, and analyse data produced from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. However it rapidly became clear that the required computing power to deal with the immense amounts of data was far beyond the funding capacity available at CERN.
What is the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid?
The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid is a global collaboration linking grid infrastructures and computer centres worldwide to distribute, store and analyse the immense amounts of data generated by the LHC at CERN on the Franco-Swiss border.
The Tiers
The WLCG consists of three layers, or “tiers”, which are made up of computer centres which contribute to different aspects of the WLCG.
Tier-0 is one site: the CERN Computing Centre. All data from the LHC passes through this central hub but it provides less than 20% of the total compute capacity. It is connected to other major tiers and Grid services using dedicated 10 gigabits per second optical wide area links.
And now…Today, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) combines the computing resources of more than 100,000 processors from over 170 sites in 34 countries, producing a massive distributed computing infrastructure that provides more than 8000 physicists around the world with near real-time access to LHC data, and the power to process it.
Tier-1 consists of eleven sites. These are located in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Spain, Taipei, the UK, and two sites in the USA. These sites provide distribution networks, processing of raw data, data analysis, and storage facilities.
Tier-2: there are around 160 sites covering most of the globe. Together, these sites provide approximately half of the capacity needed to process the LHC data.
