Networked experiments of the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN)
CERN provides experimental facilities for particle physics experiments,
mainly in the domain of high-energy physics (HEP). CERN's current major
facility is the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider in a 27-km tunnel,
the largest machine of this type in the world. Four very large experiments
in man-made caverns intersect the LEP tunnel, constituting about half of
CERN's total experimental program for the 1990's. Each of the experiments
is carried out by teams of several hundred of physicists from more than 50
institutes in five continents.
All existing and future CERN experiments produce large amounts of data. For
example, the LEP experiments generate 25 terabytes of data each year, which
are stored on magnetic tape cartridges, whereas the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC) experiments, expected to commence in 2005, are expected to produce
several order of magnitudes more data.
The sheer volume of the data combined with the complexity of the analysis
to be performed, and the requirement that the processing of the data may
also be done remotely, places heavy demands on the High Energy & Nuclear
Physics (HENP) computing and networking infrastructure, which can only be
met by using leading edge technology and services.
Collaborators
Worldwide collaborators: based at CERN
CERN/US collaborators: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), California
Institute of Technology (Caltech), Cornell University, Fermilab, Harvard
University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), Princeton University and ESnet
http://www.cern.ch