GridPP gets £28m award

Issued: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 12:59:00 BST

(Sept 2010)  GridPP, a collaboration of particle physicists and computer scientists from the UK and CERN, led by Prof. David Britton from the University of Glasgow, has been awarded £28 million to extend the project into a fourth phase.  In the earlier phases, they built a distributed computing Grid across the UK for particle physicists, which is an integral part of the largest global scientific Grid in existence, the world-wide LHC Computing Grid.  

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator is now producing data at CERN at a rate that has increased by four orders of magnitude in the last six months.  The Grid is being used to process the accompanying data deluge that is only just starting.  The UK Grid currently contributes more than the equivalent of 20,000 PCs to this worldwide effort with 10% of these being located in Glasgow, the largest UK Tier-2 site.  Glasgow is recognised for providing high-quality support both internationally and locally.  The Glasgow resources have also been well used by other research groups with for example nearly 175,000 jobs run by the Solid State Physics group over the past year.

The World-Wide LHC Computing Grid displayed on the Real Time Monitor developed by GridPP.

The circles show resource in use and the lines show jobs moving between sites.