VISUALIZATION

The UK's largest computing grid recently received further funding in the run up to CERN's launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), slated to come online at the end of 2007. The funding is earmarked for the GridPP project building a grid capable of synthesising the enormous amounts of data expected to be generated by LHC. The amount of information generated by LHC will require the close collaboration of experts throughout Europe and the recent grant by the UK’s Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) to the tune of €44 million will help ensure UK physicists stay connected with colleagues on the other side of the Channel. LHC will be a boon to physicists across Europe, and indeed throughout the world, in terms of the data generated to help answer some of the most fundamental questions about the world around us. The CEO of PPARC, Professor Keith Mason, discussed the need for the proper tools to digest the information. "The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the world’s largest physics experiment, recreating conditions last seen just after the Big Bang in order to better understand our Universe. The detectors will register a deluge of data at up to 15 Gigabytes per second – or 3 DVDs every second. To store and manage this data requires a new approach – the Grid." The Grid operates essentially like a single computer, allowing numerous scientists to access information at any one time. The Grid currently has the capacity to support five thousand processors at 17 sites across the UK, and the newly allocated funds will push that number to 20 thousand by 2011. The funding will also be used to connect the Grid to others like it over 50 countries, such as the EU-funded EGEE project. The UK Grid will be used to analyse the petabytes (millions of Gigabytes) of data produced by the LHC each year in its search for the basic building blocks of matter. Project leader for the next phase of development for the Grid, Dr David Britton from Imperial College London, stressed how the funding will impact the GridPP's outcome in anticipation of the LHC launch. "This funding takes us in to the most exciting phase of GridPP, testing all the work that has gone before as we start receiving the LHC data and providing it to the users – scientists all around the UK are eager to take part in the likely scientific breakthroughs. Without GridPP they would be excluded from the exciting discoveries that will be made in particle physics in the next few years." At European level, the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, or EGEE, funded by the European Commission, will serve as the central communication framework for the continent. EGEE developed out of the former EU DataGrid project and serves over 90 institutions from 32 countries. It consists of over 20,000 CPU with 5 Petabytes (5 million Gigabytes) of storage, and maintains 20,000 concurrent jobs on average.