About the session
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collides protons together at very high energy, and the resulting interactions between the constituent quarks and gluons take place under conditions close to those existing at the time of the big bang. These conditions permit the study of the underlying forces of nature, the production of new particles such as the Higgs boson, and the search for for new physics processes such as evidence for supersymmetry. The LHC has been running in full data-taking mode since 2010. Collisions occur every 50 ns, leaving signals in the four large detectors (ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE), which contain many millions of sensitive electronic channels. This interaction rate gives rise to the "data deluge" of the LHC, requiring the processing of many tens of petabytes of data annually. The complete chain involves management and storage of raw data, its reconstruction using the worldwide distributed computing infrastructure known as the "Grid", the replication and management of processed data, and the final analysis by physicists. The UK the "GridPP" project, in collaboration with the National Grid Service, provides the necessary computing infrastructure, connected to the World Wide Grid though the JANET academic network. There are over 250,000 processing cores in the Grid, spread between sites from Brazil to Russia. This complex system works as a result of a very high level of standardisation, and a high level of cooperation with and between national authorities. This lecture presents the physics motivation for the LHC and then explores the computing and data management environment that is needed to realise the project.
