Brief description: After a very short introduction to CERN, the LHC machine and the four LHC detectors, the computing challenges are described in terms of nature and scale, leading to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid collaboration. The CERN Tier-0 is an important part of WLCG; in order to support its remote extension in Hungary, a number of transformations were required. The talk then describes the steep rise of the future LHC computing requirements and the options currently investigated to address them. Commercial clouds are potentially part of the solution; CERN is leading a consortium of ten research organisations driving HNSciCloud, an EC-funded project to understand how to seamlessly integrate commercial cloud resources into the workflow of the on-premise data centres.
Speaker's bio: Dr Helge Meinhard studied physics and obtained his Ph. D. in experimental particle physics in 1991. After two years of research at CERN, he provided computing support to the CHORUS and ATLAS experiments at CERN. In 2001 he joined CERN's IT Department, where until 2009 he was responsible of server and storage procurements. From 2010 to 2015 he was the leader of the "Platform and Engineering Services" group; the group provided large-scale services to the physics and the engineering communities, most notably a batch computing service on about 6'300 servers that has been a cornerstone of the data processing for the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. He is now working on preparations for the computing at the HL-LHC era (about 2025).