UK participates in world computing record

UK physicists have successfully taken part in a challenge to test an international scientific computing Grid under working conditions. During the week-long challenge, the LHC Computing Grid sustained transfer rates of a gigabyte per second. - a world first for a permanent, international Grid using scientific data. Completion of the tests was announced on February 15th by the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid collaboration (WLCG) at the international Computing for High Energy and Nuclear Physics 2006 conference (CHEP'06) in Mumbai, India.

The maximum sustained data rates achieved correspond to transferring a DVD worth of scientific data every five seconds. Professor Tony Doyle, leader of the UK particle physics Grid, commented, "At these rates, it would take 25 days to transfer the nearly 400,000 films listed at IMDB.com and only an hour and a half to transfer the 1000 films produced each year by the Mumbai-based Bollywood. It might take a bit longer to watch them all!"

The data was transferred from CERN  in Geneva, Switzerland to 12 major computer centres  around the globe. CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire represented the UK, receiving data from CERN at nearly 200 megabytes per second via the UKLIGHT network managed by UKERNA. Over 20 other computing facilities worldwide, including those at the UK's Universities of Edinburgh, Lancaster and Imperial College London, were also involved in successful tests of a global Grid service for real-time storage, distribution and analysis of this data.

The LHC Computing Grid is needed to manage the data deluge from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). When it starts in 2007 the LHC will probe the physics of the Universe at the earliest moments after the Big Bang - and in the process produce 15 million Gigabytes of data a year that need to be shared, stored and analysed around the world.

Read the full PPARC press release.