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LHC Computing Grid project (Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid)
One of the main objectives for High Energy Physics is to answer questions about the fundamental particles of matter and the forces acting between them. In particular the goal is to explain why some particles are much heavier than others, and why particles have mass at all.
The answer could reside in an phenomenon of the "Higgs field", but at the moment there is no evidence of its existence.
To that end, CERN is building the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever conceived. The search for the Higgs field at the LHC will generate huge amounts of data.
Almost 10 PB of data are produced by LHC every year. For this entire huge complex to work in a coordinated fashion, and appear to the physicist as much as possible as a single system, a layer of middleware software has to be developed and deployed. The High Energy Physics community is eagerly looking at the GRID technology to provide a solution to this large distributed computing problem.

Review of European Grid projects

LHC Computing Grid project (Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid) One of the main objectives for High Energy Physics is to answer questions about the fundamental particles of matter and the forces acting between them. In particular the goal is to explain why some particles are much heavier than others, and why particles have mass at all. The answer could reside in an phenomenon of the "Higgs field", but at the moment there is no evidence of its existence. To that end, CERN is building the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever conceived. The search for the Higgs field at the LHC will generate huge amounts of data. Almost 10 PB of data are produced by LHC every year. For this entire huge complex to work in a coordinated fashion, and appear to the physicist as much as possible as a single system, a layer of middleware software has to be developed and deployed. The High Energy Physics community is eagerly looking at the GRID technology to provide a solution to this large distributed computing problem.

CrossGrid project The Cross Grid project will develop, implement and exploit new Grid components for interactive compute and data intensive applications like simulation and visualisation for surgical procedures, flooding crisis, team decision support systems, distributed data analysis in high-energy physics, air pollution combined with weather forecasting. The elaborated methodology, generic application architecture, programming environment, and new Grid services will be validated and tested thoroughly on the CrossGrid testbed, with an emphasis on a user friendly environment. The work will be done in close collaboration with the Grid Forum and the DataGrid project to profit from their results and experience, and to obtain full interoperability. This will result in the further extension of the Grid across eleven European countries.

Griphyn project The GriPhyN (Grid Physics Network) collaboration is a team of experimental physicists and information technology (IT) researchers who plan to implement the first Petabyte-scale computational environments for data intensive science in the 21st century. Driving the project are unprecedented requirements for geographically dispersed extraction of complex scientific information from very large collections of measured data. To meet these requirements, which arise initially from the four physics experiments involved in this project but will also be fundamental to science and commerce in the 21st century, GriPhyN will deploy computational environments called Petascale Virtual Data Grids (PVDGs) that meet the data-intensive computational needs of a diverse community of thousands of scientists spread across the globe.

GridStart project GRIDSTART is an initiative sponsored by the European Commission with the specific objective of consolidating technical advances in Europe, encouraging interaction amongst similar activities both in Europe and the rest of the world and stimulating the early take-up by industry and research of Grid-enabled applications. The initiative brings together technologists, scientists and industry in multi-disciplinary approach to developing the GRID infrastructure. The clear goal is to develop sustainable, effective and universal solutions addressing the needs of science, industry and the public.

DataTag project The fundamental objective of the DataTAG project is to create a large-scale intercontinental Grid testbed involving the European DataGrid project, several national projects in Europe, and related Grid projects in the USA. The project will explore some forefront research topics like the design and implementation of advanced network services for guaranteed traffic delivery, transport protocol optimisation, efficiency and reliability of network resource utilization, user-perceived application performance, middleware interoperability in multi domain scenarios, etc. The major operational goals are: To establish a global high performance intercontinental Grid testbed based on a high speed transatlantic link connecting existing high-speed national and international GRID testbeds. This infrastructure will be made available to other EU GRID projects with similar requirements through the GEANT backbone and National Research Network infrastructure.

*Other European Grid Projects* Global Grid Forum CERN Openlab SpaceGrid GridPP NEES Grid ECOGRID BIRN - Biomedical Informatics Research Network The Earth System Grid II Astrogrid BBSRC Bioinformatics and e-science programme Irish Computational Grid AVO - Astrophysical Virtual Observatory DOE SciDAC Globus Condor Legion GRIP EUROGRID NMI - NSF Middleware Initiative Damien UK Core e-science GRIA DOE science Grid Teragrid International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory Trans PAC