The LHC and grids

1. The LHC and grids • Welcome to this presentation! We’re so glad you came. While you’re here, you can explore many questions: • What is CERN and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)? • What is the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid? • What can YOU do with grid computing?

2. Grid computing Now, let’s choose a beginning… Let’s start with the world’s largest machine: the Large Hadron Collider

3. What is the LHC? Millions of people from all over the world watched when the LHC was switched on in 2008. • With its 27-km circumference, the LHC is the largest machine in the world. LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider. • Particle physicists are using the LHC to collide protons at very high energies, aiming to learn more about the Universe, • The LHC operates at about – 3000C, just above absolute zero, and speeds particles to almost the speed of light. • The LHC involves four experiments, with detectors as ‘big as cathedrals’: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb

4. Why the LHC? • The Large Hadron Collider takes physics out of the textbooks and in to real life. By smashing particles together, the LHC is helping physicists to: • - create new particles and identify their components • - reveal the nature of the interactions between particles - create an environment similar to the one present at • the origin of our Universe: the Big Bang

5. But what for? • To answer fundamental questions about the Universe: • How did the Universe begin? • What is the origin of mass? • What is the nature of antimatter? • Can we find the mysterious “God” particle: the missing Higgs boson?

6. Where is the LHC? Mont Blanc, 4810 m Downtown Geneva

7. What is CERN? CERN is the world's largest particle physics centre, and home to the LHC More than 2500 staff scientists (physicists, engineers, and more) work at CERN, with some 6500 scientists visiting at any time. CERN brings together people from 500 universities representing 80 nationalities.

8. A little off topic, but… Ever heard of the Web? The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, to improve information sharing between physicists working all over the world!

9. What is CERN? • CERN has made many important discoveries, but our current understanding of the Universe is still incomplete! • To answer questions still open, physicists around the world have built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) • If the “Higgs boson” particle exists, the LHC will almost certainly find it

10. Finding the Higgs One way to find the Higgs boson is to look at what happens to particles after they collide at high energies inside the LHC. Physicists count, trace and characterize all the particles produced and fully reconstruct the process. If they can find a characteristic decay pattern producing 4 “muon” particles, they know they’re on the trail of the Higgs!

11. Finding the Higgs Selectivity: 1 in 1013 Like looking for 1 person in a thousand world populations! Or for a needle in 20 million haystacks! Starting from this event… Physicists are looking for this “signature”

12. 1 Megabyte (1MB) A digital photo 1 Gigabyte (1GB) = 1000MB A DVD movie 1 Terabyte (1TB) = 1000GB World annual book production 1 Petabyte (1PB) = 1000TB Annual production of one LHC experiment 1 Exabyte (1EB) = 1000 PB World annual information production Data, data, data!! • But, the LHC produces 40 million collisions per second • This is filtered down to 100 interesting collisions per second • Each collision produces about one Megabyte of data = recording rate of 0.1 Gigabytes/sec • 1010 collisions recorded each year • = 10 Petabytes/year of data, plus analysis data! • This is a MASSIVE data-handling challenge! ALICE CMS LHCb ATLAS

13. Balloon (30 Km) Data, data, data!! CD stack with 1 year LHC data! (~ 20 Km) The LHC will produce around 15 Petabytes of data every year! That’s about 20 million CDs each year! Concorde (15 Km) Where will we store all of these data? Mt. Blanc (4.8 Km)

14. Data, data, data!! LHC data analysis requires a computing power equivalent to ~ 100,000 of today's fastest PC processors! Where will we find such computing power?

15. CERN Computer Centre • High-throughput computing based on reliable “commodity” technology • More than 5000 PCs with around 20,000 processor cores • More than 8 petabytes (8 million Gigabytes) of disk storage and 18 petabytes of magnetic tape storage Nowhere near enough!

16. LHC Computing • Problem: CERN alone can provide only a fraction of the resources necessary to crunch all that LHC data. • Solution:Connect all the particle physics computing centers, uniting the computing resources of particle physicists in the world!

17. Computing for the LHC: a problem? Grid computing: the solution!

18. LHC Computing Grid • Mission: • Install a functioning grid to help the LHC experiments collect and analyse data coming from the detectors • Strategy: • Integrate thousands of computers at hundreds of participating institutes worldwide into a global computing resource. • Results: • The Worldwide LCG launched in October 2008 with more • than 100,000 processors from 140 institutions in 33 countries, producing a massive distributed supercomputer that will provide more than 7000 physicists around the world with near real-time access to LHC data, and the power to process it.

19. WLCG challenges • The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid is able to: • share data between thousands of scientists with multiple interests • link major computer centres, not just PCs • ensure all data accessible anywhere, anytime • grow rapidly, yet remain reliable for more than a decade • cope with different management policies of different centres • ensure data security: more is at stake than just money! • be up and running anytime the LHC is producing data

20. What is grid computing? But wait… • Just to recap, what’s the difference between the World Wide Web and grid computing? • The World Wide Web provides seamless access to information that is stored in many millions of different geographical locations • Grid computing provides seamless access to computing power and data storage capacity distributed over the globe.

21. How do grids work? • Grids rely on advanced software, called middleware, to ensure seamless communication between different computers and different parts of the world • Grid search engines not only find the data a scientist needs, but also the data processing techniques and the computing power to carry out data analysis • Grids can distribute computing tasks to wherever in the world there is spare capacity, and send the result to the scientists

22. How do grids work? • Imagine you’re a scientist. Your grid middleware: • Finds convenient places for the your “jobs” (computing tasks) to run • Optimises use of globally dispersed computing resources • Organises efficient access to scientific data • Deals with authentication at different sites you are using • Interfaces to local site authorisation • and resource allocation policies • Runs the jobs • Monitors progress • Recovers from problems • … and …. • Tells you when the work is complete and sends your results back!

23. Who else uses grids? • Computational scientists & engineers: large scale modeling of complex structures • Experimental scientists: storing and analyzing large data sets • Collaborations: large scale multi-institutional projects • Corporations: global enterprises and industrial partnership • Environmentalists: climate monitoring and modeling • Trainers & educators: virtual learning rooms and laboratories

24. Grid benefits • More effective and seamless collaboration of dispersed communities, both scientific and commercial • Ability to run large-scale applications comprising thousands of computers, for wide range of applications • Transparent access to distributed resources from your desktop, or even your mobile phone • The term “e-Science” has been coined to express these benefits

25. Enabling Grids for E-Science • Creating a global grid for global e-science • Mission: • Deliver 24/7 grid service to European science; re-engineer grid middleware for production; market grid solutions to different scientific communities • Results: • EGEE currently involves more than 240 institutions in 45 countries, supporting science in more than 20 disciplines, including bioinformatics, medical imaging, education, climate change, energy, agriculture and more.

26. The EGEE Vision Grid computing is already changing the way science and much else is done around the world. What will the future hold? An international network of scientists will be able to model a new flood of the Danube in real time, using meteorological and geological data from several centers across Europe. A team of engineering students will be able to run the latest 3D rendering programs from their laptops using the Grid. A geneticist at a conference, inspired by a talk she hears, will be able to launch a complex biomolecular simulation from her mobile phone.

27. Grids in science • There’s so much that grids can already do! Here are some examples in: • Medicine(imaging, diagnosis and treatment ) • Bioinformatics(study of the human genome and proteome to understand genetic diseases) • Nanotechnology(design of new materials from the molecular scale) • The environment • (weather forecasting, earth observation, modeling • and prediction of complex systems)

28. Medicine “Grids will enable a standardized, distributed digital mammography resource for improving diagnostic confidence" • Digital image archives • Collaborative virtual environments • On-line clinical conferences “Grids make it possible to use large collections of images in new, dynamic ways, including medical diagnosis.” “The ability to visualise 3D medical images is key to the diagnosis of pathologies and pre-surgical planning”

29. Bioinformatics • Capturing the complex and evolving patterns of genetic information, determining the development of an embryo • Understanding the genetic interactions that underlie the processes of life-form development, disease and evolution. “Every time a new genome is sequenced the result is compared in a variety of ways with other genomes. Each code is made of 3.5 billion pairs of chemicals…”

30. Nanotechnology • New and 'better' materials • Benefits in pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, food production, • electronics manufacture from the faster, cheaper discovery of new • catalysts, metals, polymers, organic and inorganic materials “Grids have the potential to store and analyze data on a scale that will support faster, cheaper synthesis of a whole range of new materials.”

31. Environment • Modeling and prediction of earthquakes • Climate change studies and weather forecast • Pollution control • Socio-economic growth planning, financial modeling and • performance optimization “Federations of heterogeneous databases can be exploited through grid technology to solve complex questions about global issues such as biodiversity.”

32. Get involved! • Volunteer computing grids, like SETI@home, rely on volunteers like you to donate spare computing cycles when their computer is idle. SETI@home spawned an entire industry: Xpulsar@home, Genome@home, Folding@home, evolutionary@home, FightAIDS@home, SARS@home... ...LHC@home and more!

33. Want more? www.cern.ch/lcg www.gridcafe.org lhcathome.cern.ch www.eu-egi.org www.eu-egee.org www.gridrepublic.org