Travel to the SuperComputing 2009 Conference (SC09); November 2009; Portland, Oregon

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Caltech High Energy Physics (HEP) group is awarded supplemental funds to partly support the HEP team's participation in SuperComputing 2009 Conference (SC09) in Portland, Oregon. The requested funds will partially support the five key team members from Caltech to participate in the conference, and continue its demonstrations and development of state of the art networking as well as tools and services used for data distribution and analysis in support of the US LHC program and other major programs funded by the NSF. The two largest physics collaborations at the LHC, CMS and ATLAS, each encompassing more than 2,000 physicists and engineers from 170 universities and laboratories, are about to embark on a new round of exploration at the frontier of high energies, breaking new ground in our understanding the nature of matter and space-time and searching for new particles, when the LHC accelerator and their experiments resume operation next Spring. In order to fully exploit the potential for scientific discoveries, the data produced by the experiments will be processed, distributed, and analyzed using a global grid of 150 computing and storage facilities located at laboratories and universities around the world. The key to discovery is the analysis phase, where individual physicists and small groups located at sites around the world repeatedly access, and sometimes extract and transport multi-terabyte data sets on demand, in order to optimally select the rare "signals" of new physics from potentially overwhelming "backgrounds" from already-understood particle interactions. These data will amount to many tens of Petabytes in the early years of LHC operation, rising to the Exabyte range within the coming decade. The HEP team hopes that the demonstrations at SC09 will pave the way towards more effective distribution and use for discoveries of the masses of LHC data. In addition to benefiting the LHC and other programs in data intensive science, the record- breaking results have help focused the world's attention on the primary role of HEP in the development of cyberinfrastructure, and applications for data transport and worldwide systems monitoring, as well as worldwide collaboration (for example Caltech's EVO system) with the potential of a broad transformative impact on research, education and on our handling of information in our daily lives.