Large Hadron Collider goes global

William Atkins
Friday, 03 October 2008 19:48

Science - Energy

Upon the announcement of the start of the Computing Grid, three CERN officials made comments within the article.

Ian Bird, LCG project leader, states, “Our ability to manage data at this scale is the product of several years of intense testing. Today’s result demonstrates the excellent and successful collaboration we have enjoyed with countries all over the world. Without these international partnerships, such an achievement would be impossible.”

Jos Engelen, chief scientific officer, states, “The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid is a vital pillar of the LHC project. It is an absolute necessity for analysis of the LHC data. It is the result of a ‘silent revolution’ in large scale computing over the last five years.”

Wolfgang von Rüden, head of the information technology department, states, “We are very happy to see the completion of this very long and intense development phase. I would like to acknowledge the excellent contributions by so many people all over the world in helping to complete this work on time and within budget.”

The Large Hadron Collider, located underground at the border between France and Switzerland, and near Geneva, Switzerland, is designed to discover currently predicted but unknown fundamental particles that should (hopefully) provide evidence to the origin of matter and ultimately the origin of humankind and the Universe.

Commenting on the fact that the Large Hadron Collider is the largest scientific instrument ever built, American scientist Michael Ernst, who directs the LHC data coming from the ATLAS detector, was asked if the LHC project was the most complicated project he has ever worked on.

Ernst, who works at Brookhaven National Laboratory, responded simply, "Yeah, I would say so." [TechWorld: "Parallel Internat: Inside the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid"]