Abstract
This chapter traces the development of the computing service for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN data analysis over the 10 years prior to the start-up of the accelerator. It explores the main factors that influenced the choice of technology, a data intensive computational Grid, provides a brief explanation of the fundamentals of Grid computing, and records some sof the technical and organisational challenges that had to be overcome to achieve the capacity, performance, and usability requirements of the LHC experiments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
A gram of protons contains 6 ×1023 protons; a proton accelerated at the LHC energy of 14 TeV (14 ×1015 electron-Volts) acquires very approximately the kinetic energy of a fly.
- 2.
The first full PC-based batch services at CERN were introduced in March 1997 using Windows NT, but this was rapidly superseded by the first Linux PC service opened in August of the same year.
- 3.
During the first half of 2010 the infrastructure services of the EGEE project were absorbed into a successor project, the European Grid Infrastructure.
- 4.
Sites in the Nordic countries are connected via the Nordic Data Grid Facility [14], and sites in Canada through a local Grid infrastructure.
- 5.
Examples include job scheduling and data catalogue management.
- 6.
For a detailed discussion on virtualisation see Chap. 6.
References
Baud, J.P., et al.: SHIFT, The Scalable Heterogeneous Integrated Facility for HEP Computing. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Computing in High Energy Physics, Tsukuba, Japan, March 1991, Universal Academy Press, Tokyo
Bethke, S. (Chair), Calvetti, M. , Hoffmann, H.F., Jacobs, D., Kasemann, M., Linglin, D.: Report of the Steering Group of the LHC Computing Review. CERN/LHCC/2001-004, 22 February 2001
Bird, I. (ed.): Baseline Services Working Group Report. CERN-LCG-PEB-2005-09. http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/peb/bs/BSReport-v1.0.pdf
Carminati, F. (ed.): Common Use Cases for a HEP Common Application Layer. May 2002. CERN-LHC-SC2-20-2002
Defanti, T.A., Foster, I., Papka, M.E., Stevens, R., Kuhfuss, T.: Overview of the I-WAY: Wide-Area Visual Supercomputing. Int. J. Supercomput. Appl. High Perform. Comput. 10(2/3), (Summer - Fall 1996), 123–131
Delfino, M., Robertson, L. (eds.): Solving the LHC Computing Challenge: A Leading Application of High Throughput Computing Fabrics combined with Computational Grids. Technical Proposal. CERN-IT-DLO-2001-03. http://lcg.web.cern.ch/lcg/peb/Documents/CERN-IT-DLO-2001-003.doc(version1.1)
Elmsheuser, J., et al.: Distributed analysis using GANGA on the EGEE/LCG infrastructure. J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 119 072014 (8pp) (2008)
Enabling Grids for E-Science. Information Society Project INFSO-RI-222667. http://www.eu-egee.org/fileadmin/documents/publications/EGEEIII_Publishable_summary.pdf
Ernst, M., Fuhrmann, P., Gasthuber, M., Mkrtchyan, T., Waldmann, C.: dCache – a distributed storage data caching system. In: Proceedings of Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics 2001, Beijing, China. Science Press, New York
Foster, D.G. (ed.): LHC Tier-0 to Tier-1 High-Level Network Architecture. CERN 2005. https://www.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/LHCOPN/LHCopnArchitecture/LHCnetworkingv2.dgf.doc
Foster, I., Kesselman, C.: Globus: A Metacomputing Infrastructure Toolkit. Int. J. Supercomput. Appl. 11(2), 115–128 (1997). http://www.globus.org/alliance/publications/papers.php#globus
Foster, I., Kesselman, C.: The Grid: Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1999). ISBN: 1-558660-475-8
Grid Physics Network – GriPhyN Project. http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/project_detail.php?id=11
NorduGrid. http://www.nordugrid.org/about.html
Knobloch, J. (ed.): The LHC Computing Grid Technical Design Report, CERN June 2005. CERN-LHCC-2005-024. ISBN 92-9083-253-3
Laure, E., et al.: Programming the Grid with gLite. EGEE Technical Report EGEE-TR-2006- 001- http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?p=EGEE-TR-2006-001
LHC Computing Grid goes Online - CERN Press Release. 29 September 2003. http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2003/PR13.03ELCG-1.html
Light weight Disk Pool Manager status and plans. Jean-Philippe Baud, CERN - EGEE 3 Conference Athens April 2005. https://svnweb.cern.ch/trac/lcgdm/wiki/Dpm
Lo Presti, G. , Barring, O. , Earl, A. , Garcia Rioja, R.M., Ponce, S., Taurelli, G., Waldron, D., Coelho Dos Santos, M.: CASTOR: A Distributed Storage Resource Facility for High Performance Data Processing at CERN. In: Proceedings of the 24th IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies, pp. 275–280. IEEE Computer Society (2007)
Newman, H. (ed.): Models of Networked Analysis at Regional Centres for LHC Experiments (MONARC) Phase 2 Report. CERN 24 March 2000. CERN/LCB 2000-001
Proposal for Building the LHC Computing Environment at CERN. CERN/2379/Rev. 5 September 2001. http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/35736/files/CM-P00083735-e.pdf
The Condor Project. http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor
The European Data Grid Project - European Commission Information Society Project IST- 2000-25182. http://eu-datagrid.web.cern.ch/eu-dataGrid/Intranet_Home.htm
The European Grid Infrastructure. http://www.egi.eu/
The Globus Alliance. http://www.globus.org/
The Open Science Grid. http://www.openscienceGrid.org/
The Particle Physics Data Grid. http://ppdg.net/
Storage Resource Managers: Recent International Experience on Requirements and Multiple Co-Operating Implementations, Arie Shoshani et al., pp. 47–59, 24th IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST 2007), 2007
The Virtual Data Toolkit. http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/
Scalla: Scalable Cluster Architecture for Low Latency Access Using xrootd and olbd Servers - http://xrootd.slac.stanford.edu/papers/Scalla-Intro.pdf
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Robertson, L. (2011). Computing Services for LHC: From Clusters to Grids. In: Brun, R., Carminati, F., Galli Carminati, G. (eds) From the Web to the Grid and Beyond. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23157-5_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23157-5_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23156-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23157-5
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)