LHC? Ready. GridPP? Ready.
Tue 30 Mar 2010
At midday today the Large Hadron Collider accelerated and collided protons at 7TeV. These are the highest energy collisions achieved at any accelerator and herald a new age of physics research. The LHC, which has been in development for 20 years, will explore the nature of the universe mere moments after the big bang. In the UK, the vast amounts of data coming from the LHC's detectors will be analysed using e-infrasructure provided by the GridPP project, which has spent most of the last decade preparing for the impending data deluge. CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said: "It’s a great day to be a particle physicist. A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends."
Professor Roger Jones, who works on the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, is keenly aware of what this day means "The grid has proved it is ready for full LHC production during the month of running before Christmas and in the many stress tests we have put it through. It made our first published results at lower energies possible; with the 7 Tev collisions today, 20 years of planning for the LHC and 10 years for the grid are finally coming to fruition. The grid is essential to be able to do the analysis and processing required to fully realise the potential of the LHC"
Event display of a 7 TeV proton collision recorded by ATLAS, just after midday.
In the beginning, GridPP's entire complement of hardware was 156 computers based at the computing centre at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Since then the project has grown to cover 19 sites and provides the equivalent of 20,000 machines. The project moved from a testbed to a full production service preparing for full LHC running by processing work from the multidisciplinary project Enabling Grids for EsciencE (EGEE). Through EGEE GridPP has helped to model drugs against malaria (200 CPU years of processing), automatically processing and tagging images and processing data for other particle physics experiments, such as the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment based at RAL.
Late last year, the LHC was switched on and set the previous record for high energy collisions. The two months of test running in 2009 allowed GridPP and the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to prove their computing model and plans for data distribution. Now the LHC will continue at 7Tev for the next two years, pumping out 15PB of data every year. The grid, and GridPP, are both ready and will be instrumental in unpacking the mysteries of the universe revealed by the LHC.
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