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iSGTW - 14 January 2009

iSGTW Feature - Tier-3 computing centers expand options for physicists

Feature - Tier-3 computing centers expand options for physicists (Clockwise from top): Professors Nural Akchurin, Sung-Won Lee, Alan Sill and graduate student Vanalet Rusuriye examine data transfer and local cluster performance for the Tier-3 center at Texas Tech University while remotely monitoring parameters of the LHC accelerator and CMS experiment. The mini-Remote Operations Center at TTU keeps the group in close contact with the CMS operations at CERN.Image courtesy of Alan Sill, TTU. Researchers at Texas Tech University work more than 5,000 miles from CERN, but they will have just as much chance of making new physics discoveries using the data collected at the Large Hadron Collider as scientists in Switzerland.Texas Tech runs a Tier-3 computing center that is part of the CMS collaboration, allowing physicists there to host and analyze data from the experiment locally. Tier-3 centers make up one of four tiers in the LHC Computing Grid.“Tier-3 sounds like the bottom of the chain,” said Alan Sill, a senior scientis

Kathryn Grim

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iSGTW Feature - Beauty to unlock the mystery of asymmetry

Feature - Beauty to unlock the mystery of asymmetry The LHCb electomagnetic calorimeter, a device to detect electrons, their antiparticles (called positrons) and photons, particles of light. This immense array will collect immense amounts of data, requiring immense amounts of computing power and data storage. Image courtesy of LHCb. Particles and their companion antiparticles differ only in the sign of their electric charge (positive or negative), and in other respects behave identically in most situations. Physicists were therefore stunned in 1964 to discover that some antiparticles behave differently from their particles. An experiment at CERN called LHCb, for “Large Hadron Collider beauty” (where “beauty”, also known as “bottom”, is the second heaviest of the six known quarks), will study this difference in behavior, referred to as “asymmetry.” The scientists expect to process 700 Terabytes of data a year at several Enabling Grids for E-scienceE (EGEE) sites. In

Amelia Williamson

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iSGTW Feature - Looking back on the development of the LHC grid

Feature - LCG, a challenge in 4-D: size, complexity, adaptability, funding Image courtesy of Les Robertson Les Robertson, a key player behind the development of the LHC grid, retired in 2008 after 35 years at CERN. The following highlights a speech he gave at GridFest last October.In a few words, it is hard to say something about computing that can compete with the wonders of the machine and its detectors.Nevertheless, I shall try. I hope to give an overview of the project, where it has come from, the challenges we faced, the computational structures and human collaborations we built to overcome these challenges, and a map of where we intend to go in the future.As we have seen, this accelerator creates extremely high-energy particle collisions, which in turn create new particles that decay in very complex ways as they move through the detector. The detector registers the passage of these particles with a vast number of sensors and, finally, creates a digitized summary that is recorded as what we call an “event.” Physici

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Visual

iSGTW Video of the week - ATLAS demos giant 3D digital camera

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Spotlight

iSGTW Statistic of the week - WLCG 2nd of Times top 50 technology stories

Statistic of the week - WLCG rates No. 2 in The Times’ 2008 technology stories A network of supercomputers providing the greatest data processing capacity yet unleashed has been created to cope with information pouring from the Large Hadron Collider. Image courtesy of TimesOnline Grid of 100,000 computers heralds new internet dawn reads the headline of the TimesOnline article of 29 September 2008, about the World-wide LHC Computing Grid. This article ranked number 2 in the journal’s top 50 most-read technology stories of the year, trailing only Billion pixel panoramas from your own camera. This is both good news and bad: it's wonderful to have so many people curious about the grid. On the other hand, while much of the article accurately represents what the LCG is and what it can do, some aspects of it are misleading. For example, calling the LCG “the Grid” is like calling google.com “the Web”. The LCG acts as a metagrid, in a sense. It brings together the contribute

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