Aims of the WLCG project

Discovering new fundamental particles and fields and analysing their properties with the LHC accelerator is possible only through statistical analysis of the massive amounts of data gathered by the LHC detectors ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, and detailed comparison with compute-intensive theoretical simulations.

The WLCG provides tools and computing services to help the research physicists in their work.

The goals of the WLCG project include:

• Developing components to support the physics application software, such as general-purpose scientific libraries, tools for storing, managing and accessing physics data, adaptation of general scientific simulation frameworks and toolkits to the needs of LHC, interfacing batch and interactive analysis systems to a Grid environment.
• Developing and deploying computing services based on a distributed Grid model using resources from more than a hundred computing centres around the globe.
• Managing users and their rights in an international, heterogeneous and non-centralized Grid environment.
• Collaborating with the regional and national education and research network organisations (NRENs) to ensure high bandwidth data paths between the major WLCG centres.
• Coordinating the programme of tests and services for the lifetime of the WLCG service.