The CERN/Oracle Project

This is a very interesting topic that I came across a couple months ago. I have wanted to write about it but I have been afraid that I wouldn’t be happy with the outcome. So I am going to highlight a few aspects and let you read the rest from the source.

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator is being constructed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, on the border between France and Switzerland near Geneva. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), housed 100 meters (110 yards) underground, is some 27 kilometers (17 miles) in circumference and feeds several particle detectors, one as large as a six-story building.

In or around 2007, nearly 10,000 scientists and researchers from over 30 countries, will be using the collider. The data generate through these scientists experiments will be in the arena of 5 to 8 petabytes [PB] a year. At least 100PB will be needed for the analysis of this data. This is where Oracle comes top the rescue.

To meet these requirements, CERN has been architecting and developing systems for more than 10 years, and Shiers claims that the necessary computing system will be the largest ever assembled. The resulting computing environment, according to Shiers, will be distributed among participating countries, with about two-thirds of the system installed in regional computing centers spread across Europe, America, and Asia.

The computational system to support the LHC will be implemented as a global grid, integrating large, geographically distributed computing “fabrics” (networked computer clusters or farms) in a virtual computing environment.

The solution for this challenge is Oracle’s Grid Technology.

Grids are designed to target and utilize vast amounts of distributed, commodity computing power across interconnected networks of computer farms and storage devices. As with the electrical grid, the power of a computational grid is just there when you need it.

CERN’s LHC Computing Grid (LCG) will be the global database network in the world. With such a task, there are many details that need to be worked through to make the data available throughout the world.

“There are challenging computational problems to be tackled in many areas, both in the prototyping and production phases,” says Shiers. “These include the development and management of distributed scientific applications, computational-grid middleware, automated computer-system management, high-performance networking, object security, global grid operations, and database management-which is where Oracle technology will come into play. Our expectation is that the capacity to build very large databases [VLDBs] using Oracle9i Database, as well as the utilization of such features as Real Application Clusters [RAC] and transportable tablespaces on low-end commodity Linux boxes, will help us meet some of our grid requirements.”

I talked about supercomputers a while ago and I don’t recall this project being mention in the article but this will definitely be a formidable computer in the supercomputing arena. The data storage will be unrivaled and there will need to be equally impressive computational power to process the data.

Tier 0 will include the LHC itself; the four huge data collectors-Atlas, Alice, CMS, and LHCb-extremely complex devices built around some of the world’s largest magnet systems, which will detect the collisions and measure the momenta of charged particles; and the computing systems that will absorb the raw data. Tier 1 will include the LHC Computing Centre and the comparable regional centers in Europe and the United States, where the majority of the data will be stored and analyzed. Tiers 2 and 3 will include computing centers that support the universities, labs, study groups, and physics departments that will tie into LHC. The network for the LHC Computing Centre uses Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet networks, a combination likely to repeat at other regional centers.

During the first phase of LCG construction, which began last year and will continue until 2004, scientists will develop equipment prototypes and computational techniques necessary for managing data produced by the LHC experiments. CERN’s computing farm will consist of about 3,300 high-speed commodity dual-processor tower units, with 1 terabyte of storage each-one-third of the 10,000 CPUs expected in the Tier 0+1 infrastructure. The computing center will also house a comparable portion of the estimated 10,000 disk units and hundreds of tape drives that will be used to support the LCG.

That is what I would like to draw your attention to when you read the article at Oracle Magazine. There is a lot of information on the web about particle colliders and CERN. Lots of fascinating reading. I hope you enjoy it.

Source: CERN Embarks on Massive Grid Project