New £30m funding for British part of international computer Grid

Powerful international federation of computers moves into the next phase<em> - News</em>

By Danielle Reeves
4 April 2007

The British arm of an international effort to build a computing Grid powerful enough to analyse data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at CERN has been awarded GBP 30 million new funding, it was announced last week.

The funding for GridPP, awarded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, provides a major boost to the international Grid project which is developing an international confederation of computers with previously unseen processing capabilities and speeds. The Grid lets scientists access computers around the world as though they were one large computer, using their processing and storage capacity without needing to know the physical location of the computers. It will enable particle physicists to analyse very high volumes of data which would be very difficult to do at one site.

Dr David Britton , from Imperial College London's Department of Physics explains: "When the LHC particle accelerator is switched on later this year, there will be a phenomenal amount of data coming out of it. In fact, once the LHC is running at full strength, it will produce 15 gigabytes of data per second - enough to fill a 20km-tall tower of CDs every year. Processing, analysing and storing this data on one site would involve constructing enormous computing facilities.

"So instead, we are developing the Grid to ensure that computing resources all over the planet can be used to carry out reconstruction and analysis 'jobs' on the LHC data – even if the job is submitted by a scientist on the other side of the world."

The funding announced this week will allow GridPP to continue into its third phase, running until 2011, covering the period when the LHC starts taking data.

Explaining the need for the Grid's large processing capabilities, Professor Keith Mason, CEO of PPARC added: "CERN's last large experiment had a similar problem and as a result the World Wide Web was developed there. With phases one and two of GridPP successfully demonstrating the concept, phase three will now put it into action as the data starts coming in."

The UK particle physics Grid currently has more than 5,000 processors at 17 sites across the country; with the new funding, this will increase to 20,000 by 2011.

GridPP is also integrated with other grids in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project, including more than 35 thousand processors in 50 countries. This Grid will be used to analyse the petabytes (millions of Gigabytes) of data produced by the LHC each year in its search for the basic building blocks of matter.

Dr Britton, who will be Project Leader for the third phase of GridPP, welcomed the grant, saying: "This funding takes us into the most exciting phase of GridPP, where we can test all the work that has gone before as we start receiving the LHC data and providing it to the users. Scientists all around the UK are eager to take part in the likely scientific breakthroughs. Without GridPP they would be excluded from the exciting discoveries that will be made in particle physics in the next few years."

The GridPP3 grant will cover areas including staff and hardware at the particle physics Grid sites in the UK, and more general support such as security and operations management.

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