WORLD’S LARGEST COMPUTING GRID TO BE UNVEILED

Mihika Basu
DNA

A grid technology, touted as the “pillar” of the world’s biggest experiment which attempts to decode the deepest mysteries of the universe, is all set to be formally unveiled on October 3. While the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is expected to come online next year, it will create enormous amount of data which will require large computing power for storage and analysis. Subsequently, a computing grid has been made operational using the resources all over the world with various participating institutes, including the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

Built at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, the LHC had passed its first major test in September this year.

“Once this experiments starts, it will keep generating data for the next 10 to 15 years. The data is so enormous it needs large computing power and infrastructure and a computing grid has been made operational. India has also set up part of the grid at TIFR,” said Dr K Sudhakar, scientist at TIFR and technical coordinator for hardware part of the CMS detector. He is currently in Geneva for testing and data analysis.

Saying that the need for such a technology was realised over 10 years ago while planning for the LHC accelerator and detectors, TIFR professor and India-CMS spokesperson Atul Gurtu said the concept goes beyond the World Wide Web because now huge amount of computational resources will be just a few clicks away. “This will facilitate transparent computing and date storage to be carried out across continents,” he said. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), explained Gurtu, relies on dedicated optical fibre networks to distribute data from CERN to over 140 centres situated in 33 countries. For the CMS experiment alone, there are 10 CMS Tier-1 centres and 40 Tier-II centres. “Tier-II centres form the mainstay of the computing environment, doing event simulation and providing local (in India) computation resources for data analysis. Such a Tier-II centre is located at TIFR. This technology will be demonstrated on Friday across 12-15 centres,” said Gurtu. TIFR has planned to have live webcast of the event.