Topical Briefing for WLCG

  • WLCG

  • Computing

  • Topical Briefing

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) is a global computing infrastructure whose mission is to provide computing resources to store, distribute and analyse the data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), making the data equally available to all partners, regardless of their physical location. The WLCG combines about 1.4 million computer cores and 1.5 exabytes of storage from over 170 sites in 42 countries. This massive distributed computing infrastructure provides more than 12 000 physicists around the world with near real-time access to LHC data, and the power to process it.

This page constitutes a Topical Briefing for this project.

Why do we need/use it?

The LHC produces more than 600 petabytes of data (600 million gigabytes), equivalent to over 20 000 years of 24/7 HD video recording, that cannot be stored and processed by only one Data Center.

The scale and complexity of data produced by the LHC, the world’s largest particle accelerator, is unprecedented. This data needs to be stored, easily retrieved, and analysed by physicists all over the world. This requires massive storage facilities, global networking, immense computing power, and funding.

Future

The CERN Information Technology (IT) Department is the main service provider for the distributed computing needs of the LHC experiments, under the WLCG project. IT is a reliable partner for the LHC experiments since it evolves services to match ever increasing requirements, and validates preparedness. IT tracks or leads technology evolutions and works with domain experts to continuously address future challenges.

Throughout Run 3 (expansion of the LHC physics program), CERN IT will continue to build up storage, compute and network capacity to keep up with the expected growth in data rates. CERN IT will also coordinate with the associated loosely coupled WLCG facilities the follow-up of this growth.

Key figures

Today: The WLCG contains 170 Data Centers, including CERN, that offer computing resources to the physics community. It provides a total of 1.4 million computer cores and 1.5 exabytes of storage.

In case of interview request on this topic or for a VIP visit focusing on this topic, please contact wlcg-office@cern.ch

Quotes

During the long shutdown 2, the IT teams across the whole of CERN – and from research institutions around the world worked with a clear focus on preparing for Run 3 of the LHC. 

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