On Nov. 20 at 4pm EST, a clockwise circulating beam was established in the LHC’s 17-mile ring.

After more than one year of repairs, the LHC is now back on track to create high-energy particle collisions that may yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

“The LHC is a machine unprecedented in size, in complexity, and in the scope of the international collaboration that has built it over the last 15 years,” said Dennis Kovar, U.S. Department of Energy Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics.

“I congratulate the scientists and engineers that have worked to get the LHC back up and running, and look forward to the discoveries to come.”

American scientists have played an important role in the construction of the LHC. About 150 scientists, engineers and technicians from three DOE national laboratories—Brookhaven Lab, Fermilab and Berkeley Lab—built critical accelerator components.

They are joined by colleagues from DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin in ongoing LHC accelerator R&D. The work has been supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Circulating beams are a major milestone on the way to the ultimate goal: data from high-energy particle collisions in each of the LHC’s four major particle detectors.

Over the next few months, scientists will create collisions between two beams of protons.

These very first LHC collisions will take place at the relatively low energy of 900 GeV. They will then raise the beam energy, aiming for collisions at the world-record energy of 7 TeV in early 2010. With these high-energy collisions, the hunt for discoveries at the LHC will begin.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer.

“We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

In all, an estimated 10,000 people from 60 countries have helped design and build the LHC accelerator and its four massive particle detectors, including more than 1,700 scientists, engineers, students and technicians from 97 U.S. universities and laboratories in 32 states and Puerto Rico supported by the DOE Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

NOTES FOR EDITORS:

Photos and videos from today’s event are available at: press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/

Information about the US participation in the LHC is available at uslhc.us.

Follow US LHC on Twitter at twitter.com/uslhc.

About Berkeley Lab

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California.

Visit our News center at newscenter.lbl.gov.

About Brookhaven National Laboratory

Brookhaven National Laboratory is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates and Battelle.

Visit Brookhaven Lab’s electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more: bnl.gov/newsroom.

About Fermilab

Fermilab is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory, operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science is the nation’s single-largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.

Visit our Web site at fnal.gov.

About CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics.

It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Particle Beams Once Again Accelerated in Large Hadron Collider at CERN | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

One of the most important systems needed to support the experiments that will utilise this great machine is the global computing grid: the worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). After months of preparation and two intensive weeks of 24 x 7 operation the LHC experiments are celebrating the achievement of a new set of goals aimed at demonstrating full readiness for the LHC data taking run expected to start later this year.

Whilst there have been several large-scale data-processing tests in recent years, this was the first production demonstration involving all of the key elements from data taking through to analysis. Records of all sorts were established: data taking throughput, data import and export rates between the various Grid sites, as well as huge numbers of analysis, simulation and reprocessing jobs – ATLAS alone running close to 1M analysis jobs and achieving 6GB/s, of “Grid traffic”, the equivalent of a DVD worth of data a second, sustained over long periods.

This result is particularly timely as it coincides with the transition of Grids into long-term sustainable e-infrastructures, clearly of fundamental importance to projects of the lifetime of the LHC. With the restart of the LHC only months away, one can expect a large increase in the number of Grid users: from several hundred unique users today to several thousand when data taking and analysis commences. This can only happen through significant streamlining of operations and the simplification of end-users’ interaction with the Grid. STEP’09 included massive-scale testing of end-user analysis scenarios, including “community-support” infrastructures, whereby the community is trained and enabled to be largely self-supporting, backed by a core of Grid and application experts.

WLCG combines the IT power of more than 140 computer centres, the result of collaboration between 33 countries.

Sergio Bertolucci, director of research and computing at CERN said: “The 4 LHC experiments – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb – have demonstrated their ability to manage their nominal data rates concurrently. For the first time all aspects of the experiments’ computing were exercised simultaneously: simulation, data processing and analysis. This gives them the confidence that they will be able to efficiently analyze the first data from the LHC later this year.”

Bob Jones, director of the EGEE project remarked “such a significant achievement is also a valuable testament to the state of maturity of the EGEE infrastructure and its ability to interoperate with major Grid infrastructures in other parts of the world. Ensuring that this level of service continues uninterrupted as we transition from EGEE to EGI is clearly essential to our users, including flagship communities such as High Energy Physics.”

“This is another significant step to demonstrating shared infrastructures can be used by multiple high throughput science communities simultaneously,” said Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid consortium. “ATLAS and CMS are not only proving the usability of OSG, but contributing to maturing national distributed facilities in the US for other sciences.”

David Britton, the GridPP Project Leader reported: “In the UK, STEP09 ran very smoothly at the majority of sites, which allowed the focus to be on understanding the performance and tuning the infrastructure. The RAL Tier-1 performed exceedingly well with only a single out-of-hours call out over the two week period. Valuable information was obtained on the performance of tape-drives under realistic workflows; the OPN network was tested by laying down additional UDP traffic on top of the STEP09 data; and the fairshare system was successfully tuned to balance the load between experiments.”

Gonzalo Merino, manager of the Tier1 centre in Barcelona wrote: “The Spanish WLCG sites met the STEP09 targets. It has been a very valuable exercise since many of the experiment workflows have been tested simultaneously at unprecedented scale, well above the nominal values for LHC data taking. The Tier-1 at PIC has provided a very stable and reliable service at record breaking levels: exchanging up to 80 Terabytes per day with other WLCG sites and processing data at more than 2 GBytes per second. This gives us confidence that the Spanish WLCG sites are ready for data taking.”

David Foster, head of the LHC Optical Private Network activity concluded “The LHC Optical Private Network transporting data between the sites has proven its capability both in terms of performance and resiliency during STEP’09. New capabilities emerging in the 40Gbps and 100Gbps range should enable us to keep up with the anticipated data distribution needs of the LHC experiments.”

About the Large Hadron Collider

The LHC, located at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, is the world’s largest particle accelerator. For thousands of physicists, analysing LHC data using the LHC Computing Grid will be like sifting for digital gold. Their search is predicted to unearth evidence of new fundamental particles that will provide clues to the ultimate nature of matter and the origins of our Universe.

About grid computing

Grid computing connects computers distributed over a wide geographic area. Just as the World Wide Web enables access to information, computing grids enable access to computing resources. These resources include data storage capacity, processing power, sensors, visualisation tools and more. Grids can combine the resources of thousands of different computers to create a massively powerful computing resource, accessible from the comfort of a personal computer and useful for multiple applications in science, business and beyond.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Kendra Snyder – BNL/US ATLAS public relations matters
ksnyder@bnl.gov

Grids Step-up to a Set of New Records: Scale Testing for the Experiment Programme ’09 | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.

The successful dress rehearsal proves that the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) is ready to analyze and manage real data from the massive machine. The United States is a vital partner in the development and operation of the WLCG, with 15 universities and three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories from 11 states contributing to the project.

The full-scale test, collectively called the Scale Test of the Experimental Program 2009 (STEP09), demonstrates the ability of the WLCG to efficiently navigate data collected from the LHC’s intense collisions at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, all the way through a multi-layered management process that culminates at laboratories and universities around the world. When the LHC resumes operations this fall, the WLCG will handle more than 15 million gigabytes of data every year.

Although there have been several large-scale WLCG data-processing tests in the past, STEP09, which was completed on June 15, was the first to simultaneously test all of the key elements of the process.

“Unlike previous challenges, which were dedicated testing periods, STEP09 was a production activity that closely matches the types of workload that we can expect during LHC data taking. It was a demonstration not only of the readiness of experiments, sites and services but also the operations and support procedures and infrastructures,” said CERN’s Ian Bird, leader of the WLCG project.

Once LHC data have been collected at CERN, dedicated optical fiber networks distribute the data to 11 major “Tier-1” computer centers in Europe, North America and Asia, including those at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. From these, data are dispatched to more than 140 “Tier-2” centers around the world, including 12 in the United States. It will be at the Tier-2 and Tier-3 centers that physicists will analyze data from the LHC experiments – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb – leading to new discoveries. Support for the Tier-2 and Tier-3 centers is provided by the DOE Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

“In order to really prove our readiness at close-to-real-life circumstances, we have to carry out data replication, data reprocessing, data analysis, and event simulation all at the same time and all at the expected scale for data taking,” said Michael Ernst, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Tier-1 Computing Center. “That’s what made STEP09 unique.”

The result was “wildly successful,” Ernst said, adding that the U.S. distributed computing facility for the ATLAS experiment completed 150,000 analysis jobs at an efficiency of 94 percent.

A key goal of the test was gauging the analysis capabilities of the Tier 2 and Tier 3 computing centers. During STEP09’s 13-day run, seven U.S. Tier 2 centers for the CMS experiment, and four U.S. CMS Tier 3 centers, performed around 225,000 successful analysis jobs.

“We knew from past tests that we wanted to improve certain areas,” said Oliver Gutsche, the Fermilab physicist who led the effort for the CMS experiment. “This test was especially useful because we learned how the infrastructure behaves under heavy load from all four LHC experiments. We now know that we are ready for collisions.”

U.S. contributions to the WLCG are coordinated through the Open Science Grid (OSG), a national computing infrastructure for science. OSG not only contributes computing power for LHC data needs, but also for projects in many other scientific fields including biology, nanotechnology, medicine and climate science.

“This is another significant step to demonstrating that shared infrastructures can be used by multiple high-throughput science communities simultaneously,” said Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid Consortium. “ATLAS and CMS are not only proving the usability of OSG, but contributing to maturing national distributed facilities in the U.S. for other sciences.”

Physicists in the U.S. and around the world will sift through the LHC data in search of tiny signals that will lead to discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. Through their distributed computing infrastructures, these physicists also help other scientific researchers increase their use of computing and storage for broader discovery.

U.S. support for LHC participation

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and the National Science Foundation (NSF) invested a total of $531 million in the construction of the Large Hadron Collider and the ATLAS and CMS detectors. DOE provided $200 million for the construction of critical LHC accelerator components, $250 million for the design and construction of the ATLAS and CMS detectors, and continues to support U.S. scientists’ work on the detectors and accelerator R&D. NSF has focused its support on funding university scientists who have contributed to the design and construction of CMS and ATLAS ($81 million). In addition, both agencies promote the development of advanced computing innovations to meet the enormous LHC data challenge. More than 1,700 scientists, engineers, students and technicians from 94 U.S. universities and laboratories participate in the LHC and its experiments. (A full list is available here.)

LHC Computing Grid participants

Signatories to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, India, Israel, Japan, Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the Russian Federation, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taipei, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the United States of America.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates. Visit Brookhaven Laboratory’s electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more.

Fermilab is a DOE Office of Science national laboratory, operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. The Department of Energy Office of Science is the nation’s single-largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.

The Open Science Grid is a national distributed computing grid for data-intensive research, supported by the Offices of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, High Energy Physics, and Nuclear Physics within the DOE Office of Science, and the National Science Foundation. Visit opensciencegrid.org.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Kendra Snyder, ksnyder@bnl.gov, 631-344-8191
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: Rhianna Wisniewski, rhianna@fnal.gov, 630-840-3351
Open Science Grid: David Ritchie, ritchie@fnal.gov, 630-840-3940
CERN: James Gillies, james.gillies@cern.ch, +41 22 76 741 01

Data-Taking Dress Rehearsal Proves World’s Largest Computing Grid is Ready for LHC Restart | Chicago Press Release Services - Chicago's leading press release newswire service; professional press release services, press release distribution and newswire services.