REMOTE - Distributed computing - A historical perspective The Shift and Grid projects (3/3)

by Frederic Hemmer (CERN), Les Robertson (CERN)

Friday 13 May 2022, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Zurich

Zoom

This lecture:
The move from mainframes to clusters, from many manufacturers (HP, Digital, Silicon Graphics and more) to Linux "pizza" boxes, after the "experiment" to run physics code on Windows, the purpose of RFIO, the Shift and Grid projects.

This series:
After the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) began in 1969, leading to the TCP/IP protocol development in the USA, a period of intense network competition began between continents and companies. It lasted for more than a decade and affected many protocols and applications. A number of EU-funded projects were born and have kept re-incarnating until today. How was email done in the early 1990’s? When could we send photos by email for the first time? What was the first decade of the World Wide Web like? How did HEP move from mainframes to distributed computing? Which manufacturers have since dominated the landscape in the process towards today’s computing cloud? In this series, we shall try to answer such questions, with contributions by some of the makers and leaders of this technology.

Speakers' bio:
Frédéric Hemmer studied Electrical and Mechanical Engineering (and Computing) in Brussels. He joined CERN in 1984 where he served as Systems Engineer in databases, real-time systems and more generally distributed computing. Between 1990 and 2005 fulfilled various roles including system software development, computer operations and line management and participated in various e-infrastructures related EC projects. He lead the CERN IT department between 2009 till mid-2021. He is now member of the online team of the LHCb collaboration.
Frédéric is also a member of the Swiss Innovation Agency (Innosuisse) Council and member of the IEEE and ACM.

Les Robertson worked on operating system development in the United Kingdom before arriving at CERN in 1974 as a systems programmer for the CDC 7600 computer. He spent 36 years in data processing at CERN in various technical and managerial roles, ending his career as the leader of the LHC Computing Grid project.

2013 article by Juergen Knobloch "Four Decades of Computing in Subnuclear Physics – from Bubble Chamber to LHC"

Grid efforts from other disciplines

Hemmer-CERN-AT-Shift-project-20220512.pdf

Recording

Robertson-CERN-AT-Early-history-of-the-LHC-Grid.pdf

Robertson-CERN-AT-Early-history-of-the-LHC-Grid.pptx

The LCG Deployment museum - software releases 2003-2012

Video preview