From Physics to Daily Life

4Grid and Cloud

Bob Jones

Today, the research community is facing a deluge of data produced by the latest generation of scientific instruments. This increased scale of scientific data is putting pressure on existing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services which are struggling to store, distribute, process, analyse and preserve this precious commodity. At the same time, the need to demonstrate a return on investment is accelerating the scientific process itself, reducing the time from the acquisition of data to the publication of results. This demands that ICT services be more reliable and dynamic in their ability to serve the research community. As a consequence, the cost of ICT to the research community is continuously increasing and becoming a significant item in organisations' budgets.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is a prime example of a research instrument with exceptional data processing needs. To address such needs, it has been necessary to revitalize the ICT models used by the research community in order to adapt to the changing needs of researchers, and to embrace new disruptive technologies and profit from the restructuring of the commercial sector which is introducing new products and services.

The LHC complex provides research facilities for several thousand High-Energy Physics (HEP) researchers from all over the globe. The LHC experiments are designed and constructed by large international collaborations and will collect data over a period ...