LHC Grid Fest

Europe/Zurich
The Globe of Science and Innovation

The Globe of Science and Innovation

Route de Meyrin CH-Meyrin
Description
Welcome!
The Worldwide Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid collaboration cordially invites you to attend the LHC Grid Fest.
The LHC Grid Fest celebrates the readiness of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, an e-infrastructure conceived and designed to manage an estimated 15 million gigabytes of data every year—and with this tool, to support the research of more than 7000 physicists around the globe.
The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid is not only a celebration of technology and innovation, but also of international collaboration and cooperation. We invite you to join government and funding agency representatives and scientists across the world in commemorating the start of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid’s massive data challenge.

Please ensure that you register before 26 September 2008, as attendance at this event is strictly limited to registered guests. You may also register for tours at this time.


DEMOS ALL DAY

WLCG - See the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid in action
ALICE - Learn more about LHC ALICE experiment in heavy-ion detection
ATLAS - Talk physics with the team from the 7000-tonne LHC ATLAS experiment
LHCb - Discover the “b” for “beauty” in the LHCb experiment
CMS – Understand the “compact” in the 12,500-tonne LHC Compact Muon Solenoid experiment
Health-e-Child - Apply grid computing to children’s health
ITER - Get closer to clean energy thanks to grid-enabled research in to fusion energy
OSG - Learn more about grid applications on the U.S.-based Open Science Grid - see also "Open Science Grid for today's event"
WISDOM - Join the fight against disease thanks to grid-enabled drug discovery

Site Tour Video
    • 1
      Registration - Demos in ground floor area, Coffee available
    • 2
      Press briefing - Background on CERN - First floor
      Video in CDS
    • Morning Session
      • 3
        Welcome
        Speaker: Wolfgang von Rüden (CERN Information Technology Department Head)
        Video in CDS
        Welcome Speech
      • 4
        CERN and LHC - their place in global science
        The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest scientific instrument in the world. It brings into collision intense beams of protons and ions to explore the structure of matter and investigate the forces of nature at an unprecedented energy scale, thus serving a community of some 7,000 particle physicists from all over the world.
        Speaker: Robert Aymar (CERN Director General)
        CERNandLHC_TheirPlaceinGlobalScience
        Video in CDS
      • 5
        Background on LHC and LCG - Chaired by Wolfgang von Rüden
        Video in CDS
        • a) Physics Goals
          The LHC opens a new domain of energies for exploration by the physicists of the world. There are many known phenomena to be studied in more detail, there are predictions of the current theory that we expect to confirm, such as the Higgs boson which explains why particles have mass, and then we expect that there will be discoveries that give us clues to some of the mysteries that are not explained by the Standard Model, or even unveil things that we do not even imagine.
          Speaker: Jos Engelen (CERN Chief Scientific Officer)
          PhysicsGoals
        • b) Machine
          To guide and focus its rigid high-energy beams along the 26.7 km circumference underground tunnel housing the machine, the LHC uses several thousand high-field superconducting magnets, operating in superfluid helium at 1.9 K. The design and construction of the accelerator posed many technological challenges: all components and systems had to be developed beyond the pre-existing state-of-the-art, industrialised, and produced in large series at competitive prices. Initiated by the twenty European member states of CERN, the LHC has also become a global project, with special contributions from Canada, India, Japan, Russia and the United States of America.
          Speaker: Philippe Lebrun (CERN Accelerator Technology Department Head)
          TheMachine_Lebrun
        • c) Experiments
          Protons (and heavy ions) will be collided at unprecedented high energies to recreate and study states of matter believed to have been present a fraction of a nanosecond after the Big Bang. The detectors for the experiments are arguably the most complex scientific instruments ever built. They are typically an order of magnitude larger and more complex than previous ones and have to operate in a very harsh environment created by hundreds of billions of particles produced every second, and to register with high accuracy the passage and energies of all these particles, thus demanding huge data collection, transfer and processing rates on a scale greater than ever previously attempted.
          Speaker: Jim Virdee (Spokesperson for the CMS collaboration)
          Experiments
        • d) Worldwide LHC Computing Grid
          The computing challenges for LHC data analysis, the reasons for choosing a highly distributed solution, and the development of the LHC grid as a worldwide service to meet the current and future demands of the experiments.
          Speaker: Les Robertson (Former WLCG Project Leader)
          WLCG
          WLCG_SlideNotes
        • e) Questions and Answers
      • 6
        Grids and Society - Chaired by Ian Bird
        Video in CDS
        • a) Grids in other sciences
          EGEE (Enabling Grids for EsciencE) operates the world’s largest multi-science production Grid infrastructure. As the flagship project of the European Commission, EGEE unites regional and national Grid infrastructures into a seamless whole, able to support scientists in their research 24/7. The users of the EGEE Grid are organised into Virtual Organizations, allowing them to share resources, codes, data and common tools specific to their fields of study. Coordinated by CERN and integrating the majority of resources from institutes contributing to the LHC experiments, EGEE forms the cornerstone of the LHC Computing Grid. Beyond physics, more than 200 Virtual Organizations make use of EGEE, in a wide range of fields including Life Sciences, Computational Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Astronomy, Gaming and Finance. The EGEE infrastructure includes approximately 300 sites in 50 countries spanning Europe, Asia and the Americas. The infrastructure handles more than 300,000 application executions per day. EGEE actively purses interoperability with collaborating projects in the USA (Open Science Grid and TeraGrid), Japan (NAREGI) as well as India and China. At the start of its third phase, EGEE is looking toward the future of Grid computing and how this technology can be transferred to a wide range of science and business sectors.
          Speaker: Bob Jones (CERN - EGEE Project Director)
          Grids in other sciences
        • b) EU vision
          Antti Peltomäki will take stock of the impact of the over €100 Mio support provided by the European Commission to the EGEE e-Infrastructure allowing the distribution and analysis of the data produced by the LHC. He will also depict the European Commission's vision of establishing a sustainable model for the funding and operation of e-Science grids in the context of the European Research Area (ERA).
          Speaker: Antti Peltomäki ((European Commission - Deputy Director General, Information Society & Media DG))
          EUVision
        • c) US vision
          Speaker: Ed SEIDEL (Head of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the U.S. National Science Foundation)
        • d) Q&A session
      • 7
        Official commemoration of the start of the analysis of data from the LHC experiments using the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid
        Video in CDS
      • 8
        Short, direct video interventions from a selection of Worldwide LHC Computing Grid sites around the world
        Speaker: Ian Bird (CERN LHC Computing grid project leader)
        Video in CDS
      • 9
        Industrial support
        Video in CDS
        • a) CERN openlab
          CERN openlab is a framework for collaboration between CERN and the IT industry. The talk will give a short overview of the openlab mission and highlight the most important achievements. It will conclude with a preview of the roadmap forth the coming three years
          Speaker: Wolfgang von Rüden (CERN Information Technology Department Head)
          openlab
        • b) Presentation by CERN Director General of LHC Computing Awards to industrial collaborators
    • 13:00
      Buffet Lunch
    • Afternoon Session
      • 10
        The LHC experiments - a challenge for computing - Chaired by Jamie Shiers
        Video in CDS
        • a) The challenge of online triggering
          Online triggering at the LHC is the most challenging search for the needle in the haystack ever. Out of a billion collisions one or two interesting events must be found. 100 Gigabytes of data must be moved every second, the equivalent of watching 40 2hr movies in fastforward every second.
          Speaker: Niko Neufeld (CERN and LHCb)
          Challenge_Online_Triggering
        • b) From collisions to physics - LHC data analysis
          LHC detectors produce a large amount of electronic signals (more than 1 GigaByte/event per experiment) that have to be processed in order to produce physics results. This talk describes the main processing steps (calibration, reconstruction and analysis) and the software tools and computing infrastructure developed by LHC experiments and the WLCG collaboration.
          Speaker: Dario Barberis (CERN, GENOA Univ/INFN and ATLAS)
          LHC Data analysis
        • c) Collaborating at a distance
          LHC is a competitive collaboration of thousands of people in many organisations spread across the globe, all working towards the common goal of fundamental scientific discovery. We describe the communication and collaboration dynamics and some of the practical solutions, tools and working practices that enable such collaboration at a distance to work.
          Speaker: Lucas Taylor (Northeastern University, Boston and CMS)
          Collaborating at a distance
        • d) End-user analysis
          The challenges of end user analysis at the LHC are the data input sets of varying formats and sizes (from a few rare special events to full data sets of 10^9 events), the number of analysis cycles needed to extract the physics signals (varying from one scheduled production to tens of cycles needed to optimize the algorithms) and last not least the large number of physicists performing analysis with their wide spectrum of computing skills. Because of the large computing needs batch type analysis, both scheduled and individual user analysis, are performed on large computing grids. At the same time the need for fast development and testing cycles triggered an interest in interactive tools. This talk describes the solutions implemented by the LHC experiments to cope with these analysis challenges.
          Speaker: Andreas Morsch (CERN and ALICE)
          End-User analysis
        • e) The service
          The LHC grid service has grown during the 6 years of the project from simple prototypes to the full scale service which we believe is now ready to store, transport, and analyse the torrent of data from the LHC. This has been achieved through a series of data and service challenges, designed to test and stress various aspects of the service, culminating in a full scale readiness challenge earlier this summer. Building the service has involved bringing together different underlying science grid infrastructures and addressing both technical and policy issues to ensure smooth operation.
          Speaker: Ian Bird (CERN Worldwide LHC Computing Grid Project Leader)
          The service
        • f) Networking for LHC
          The LHC relies on the distributed processing and storage available at institutes distributed around the world. The fabric of interconnections is realised through a large number of initiatives and computer networks. This presentation will briefly discuss these communications networks and their importance to the LHC and society in general.
          Speaker: David Foster (Head of Data Networking at CERN)
          Networking for the LHC
          SlideNotes_Networking for the LHC
        • g) Questions and Answers
      • 15:30
        Coffee Break
      • 11
        Industrial collaboration through the CERN openlab - Chaired by Sverre Jarp
        Video in CDS
        • a) Networking the LHC Grid
          Bill will speak of the network infrastructure that carries the massive volume of data generated LHC Grid. The magnitude of the challenge put forth in collecting and distributing information from the one of the largest single sources of information in the world.
          Speaker: Bill Johnson (Hewlett Packard ProCurve)
          Networking LHC Grid
        • b) The Drive for improved performance/watt and increasing compute density
          With the activation of the LHC, the demand for computing will continue to increase but with significant constraints on being able to increase power. This talk will focus on the vision to improve the power/performance trends to continue to deliver the performance required for the advancement of science.
          Speaker: Stephen Pawlowski (Intel - CTO of the Digital Enterprise Group)
          Slides
        • c) When Research Meets Industry
          Working together for the last 26 years has been a great journey, with its share of challenges and rewards. The start-up of the LHC and its Computing Grid infrastructure crowns the joint efforts that CERN and Oracle made towards the set up of an operational environment that will support the accelerator and the lab over the coming years. Integrating CERN's unique requirements into Oracle technology proved a successful means to validate Oracle's solutions and pushing their limits to the cutting-edge. At the same time, it significantly contributed to the adoption of the Oracle Grid technology in the more commercial world, proving the connections between R&D, Innovation and Business. To achieve this, CERN openlab provided an ideal framework to develop and strengthen the CERN-Oracle partnership.
          Speaker: Stephane Rousset (Senior Vice-President EMEA)
          Slides
        • d) Questions and Answers
    • American time-zone