The mysteries of dark matter, multiple dimensions and even the
conditions following the Big Bang could be solved with the help of the world's biggest computer grid — a big chunk of which is being built in sleepy Oxfordshire.The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid, being constructed at CERN, near Geneva, will be the largest scientific instrument on the planet and will need hugely powerful computing to process the 15PB of data that it will produce each year.
The LHC will smash protons and ions in head-on collisions to help scientists understand the structure of matter.
Discovering new types of particles can only be done by statistical analysis of the massive amounts of data the experiments will generate — which is where the LHC Computing Grid project comes in.
Although the LHC won't be up and running until 2007, work has already begun on the grid, with the UK being one of the largest contributors.
Of the 150 grid sites around the world, 18 are in the UK. Much of the UK work is being done at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire. See pictures here.
Because of the scale of processing needed, grid is the best way to go, explained John Gordon, deputy director of the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils e-Science Centre at RAL. "The computing has been planned for years; we've been looking at distributed computing for a long time," said Gordon.
"They couldn't afford to do all the computing at CERN so we knew we would have a big distributed computing problem of sifting the data around the world and finding it again. It's the biggest production grid in the world," Gordon added
The grid will use a four-tier model — data will be stored on tape at CERN, the Tier-0 centre. From there, data will be distributed to Tier-1 sites which have the storage and processing capacity to cope with a chunk of the data. These sites make the data available to the Tier-2s, which are able to...
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