About WLCG

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Overview

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva is the largest scientific instrument on the planet. When it begins operations in 2008, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyse. The mission of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC.

When the LHC accelerator is running optimally, access to experimental data needs to be provided for the 5000 scientists in some 500 research institutes and universities worldwide that are participating in the LHC experiments. In addition, all data need to be available over the 15 year estimated lifetime of the LHC. The analysis of the data, including comparison with theoretical simulations, requires of the order of 100 000 CPUs at 2006 measures of processing power. A traditional approach would be to centralize all of this capacity at one location near the experiments. In the case of the LHC, however, a novel globally distributed model for data storage and analysis – a computing and data Grid – was chosen because it provides several key benefits.

LCG in context

The major computing resources for LHC data analysis are provided by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid Collaboration – comprising the LHC experiments, the accelerator laboratory and the Tier-1 and Tier-2 computer centres. The LCG project manages the deployment and operation of the distributed computing services for LHC on behalf of the collaboration.

The computing centres providing resources for LCG are embedded in different operational Grid organisations, in particular EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-SciencE) and OSG (the Open Science Grid), but also several national and regional Grid structures such as GridPP in the UK, INFN Grid in Italy and NorduGrid in the Nordic region.

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project is funded by the European Commission and aims to integrate current national, regional and thematic Grid efforts, in order to create a seamless Grid infrastructure available to scientists 24 hours-a-day, for the support of scientific research. LCG and
EGEE are tightly coupled and provide complementary functions.

OSG (Open Science Grid) is a U.S. distributed computing infrastructure for large-scale scientific research, built and operated by a consortium of universities, national laboratories, scientific collaborations and software developers. The OSG integrates computing and storage resources from more than 50 sites in the United States, Asia and South America. Researchers from many fields of science use the OSG infrastructure, including the U.S. participants in the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC. The OSG is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The Globus Alliance involves several universities and research laboratories conducting research and development to create fundamental Grid technologies and produce open-source software. The LCG project is actively involved in the support of Globus and uses the Globus-based Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT) as part of the project middleware.

The LCG project is also following developments in industry, in particular through CERN openlab, where leading IT companies are testing and validating cutting-edge Grid technologies using the LCG environment.

More information can be found on the CERN Research and LHC Computing public page, and on the CERN Data Analysis public page.

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