Grid Computing
In the beginning...
In 1999, when work began on the design of a computing system for LHC data analysis, it rapidly became clear that the required computing power was far beyond the funding capacity available at CERN.
On the other hand, most of the laboratories and universities across the work collaborating on the LHC had access to national or regional computing facilities.
The obvious question was: could these facilities be somehow integrated to provide a single LHC computing service?
The rapid evolution of wide area networking—increasing capacity and bandwidth coupled with falling costs—made it look possible. From there, the path to the LHC Computing Grid was set.
WLCG - the world's largest computing grid
The WLCG computing centres are based on the two main global grids...
...to which are associated regional or national grids.
Grids in Asia also contribute to the WLCG, such as Taiwan Grid and EU-IndiaGrid, amongst others.
WLCG has benefitted from investments made by the European Commission via a series of grid-related projects such as EGEE, European DataGrid, EGI and more.
Additional benefits of a Grid system
During the development of the LHC Computing Grid, many additional benefits of a distributed "grid" system became apparent:- Multiple copies of data can be kept in different sites, ensuring access for all scientists involved, independent of geographical location.
- Having computer centres in multiple time zones eases round-the-clock monitoring and the availability of expert support.
- No single points of failure.
- Independently managed resources have encouraged novel approaches to computing and analysis.
- So-called “brain drain”, where researchers are forced to leave their country to access resources, is reduced when resources are available from their desktop.
- The system can be easily reconfigured to face new challenges, making it able to dynamically evolve throughout the life of the LHC, growing in capacity to meet the rising demands as more data is collected.
- Allows community to take advantage of new technologies that may appear and that offer improved usability, cost effectiveness or energy efficiency.