As Grid computing projects gear up to serve data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to thousands of physicists worldwide, scientists and engineers developing the LHC Computing Grid (LCG), the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) and the Open Science Grid travelled to SC|05, the 2005 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis held in Seattle on 12-18 November. Members of the Grid collaborations presented talks and posters at the Grid 2005 Workshop and the SC|05 technical programme, and particle-physics applications demonstrating interoperability across multiple Grid infrastructures featured in several SC|05 exhibits.
For the third consecutive year, the high-energy physics team captured first prize in the SC|05 Bandwidth Challenge. Led by the California Institute of Technology, Fermilab, SLAC and the University of Michigan, with participation from CERN and 10 other institutions, the team of physicists, computer scientists and network engineers transferred physics data at a rate of over 150 Gbit/s. The entry provided a showcase for the worldwide Grid system being built for the LHC experiments, using production storage systems and file servers to transfer 475 TB of high-energy physics data in 24 h.
CERN's commitment to educating the public about high-performance computing was recognized during SC|05 by HPCWire, the online magazine of high-performance computing. The laboratory was awarded the HPC Public Awareness Editor's Choice Award.
"This is a significant honour for CERN," said David Foster, head of CERN's Network and Communications Group. "All our institutional and industrial partners in LCG, EGEE and CERN openlab deserve to share in the credit. The Grid technology that is being deployed for the LHC is inevitably something that spans many institutions, all of whom are contributing to the broader public awareness concerning this new approach to high-performance computing."
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Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel