ALICE prepares for study of primordial plasma

Although scientists cannot travel back in time to study the primordial particle “soup” of the very early universe, they can do the next best thing–recreate it. In addition to accelerating and colliding protons, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will collide high-energy lead ions one month each year primarily for ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). ALICE scientists hope to use these collisions to recreate inside the detector tiny drops of primordial matter, the so called quark-gluon plasma, that presumably existed a few micro-seconds after the Big Bang.

ALICE is expected to produce around 100 Terabytes of data each day—the equivalent of about 20,000 DVDs.

“Processing this data will require extensive computing power—roughly 10,000 CPUs running continuously,” said Ron Soltz, an ALICE collaborator and researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “To pull together that much computing, the data need to be distributed to the different scientific centers around the world, and that’s where the grid comes in.” The Worldwide LHC Grid enables the raw detector data to be distributed among the 1,000 ALICE collaborators in 31 countries.

Feature - Computational chemistry

Ion channel simulations on UK’s NGS

Ion channels are intimately involved in the functioning of the brain and heart, among other things. Research in this area is extremely important.

Until he was able to access grid resources via the UK's National Grid Service, each of Philip Fowler’s 34 ion channel simulations took up to two days, totalling a couple of months. Now he completes his entire job in under two weeks.

Feature - Auction-based scheduler

Truth serum for researchers on the grid

When you request time on a shared computing resource, are you always scrupulously honest about your job’s urgency and requirements? Andrew Mutz and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara have developed a scheduler that discourages you from fibbing. It maximizes “rewards” and minimizes “costs” to users when their stated scheduling preferences are true.

Acronym of the week EUCALYPTUS Here's a mouthful: Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems Rich Wolski of the University of California, Santa Barbara covered clouds, grids and the EUCALYPTUS architecture in his dynamic keynote address last week at the eScience 2008 conference in Indianapolis. He said the acronym preceded the full name. Thank goodness. Read more				Wish of the week Happy end-of-year holidays! Next issue: 7 January 2009 iSGTW wishes you a happy and healthy end-of-year holiday season. We are taking two weeks off and our next issue will come out 7 January 2009. We appreciate your readership, feedback and contributions, and look forward to bringing you more cutting-edge grid news in the New Year. —the iSGTW team