GridPP5 Oxford Staff Grant

Lead Research Organisation: University of Oxford
Department Name: Oxford Physics

Abstract

This proposal, submitted in response to the 2014 invitation from STFC, aims to provide and operate a computing Grid for the exploitation of LHC data in the UK. The success of the current GridPP Collaboration will be built upon, and the UK's response to production of LHC data in the period April 2016 to March 2020 will be to ensure that there is a sustainable infrastructure providing "Distributed Computing for Particle Physics"
We propose to operate a distributed high throughput computational service as the main mechanism for delivering very large-scale computational resources to the UK particle physics community. This foundation will underpin the success and increase the discovery potential of UK physicists. We will operate a production-quality service, delivering robustness, scale and functionality. The proposal is fully integrated with international projects and we must exploit the opportunity to capitalise on the UK leadership already established in several areas. The Particle Physics distributed computing service will increasingly be integrated with national and international initiatives.

The project will be managed across various domains and will deliver the UK's commitment to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and ensure that worldwide activities directly benefit the UK.
By 2015, the UK Grid infrastructure will have expanded in size to 50,000 cores , with more than 35 PetaBytes of storage. This will enable the UK to exploit, in an internationally competitive way, the unique physics potential of the LHC.

Planned Impact

GridPP's knowledge exchange activities fall into two main areas: firstly, those aimed at other academic disciplines, and secondly, business and industry. GridPP has a strong outreach programme to a public and academic audience, and intends to continue this in GridPP5. The Dissemination Officer will organise GridPP's presence at conferences and events. This includes booking and manning booths, arranging backdrops, material, posters, screens, and rotas where appropriate. Examples of events that we have attended include The British Science Festival, The Royal Society Summer Exhibition, the British Science Association Science Communication Conference and Meet The Scientist at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.
GridPP has developed an extensive website that is central to project communications. The Dissemination Officer will be responsible for producing news items for the website and drafting GridPP press releases. We have had broad coverage from these in the past, including many national newspapers and online publications.
Additional activities will include producing GridPP material, such as leaflets, posters, t-shirts, bags and magic cubes. We have found these very valuable in raising GridPP's and LHC's profile at minimal cost. The Dissemination Officer will also promote outreach training for members of the collaboration, will identify GridPP staff who have specific expertise in this area and will arrange occasional GridPP events, such as the Tier-1 open day.
On KE, our initial work has proved that GridPP's technology can be of use across a range of disciplines and sectors, and we plan to continue this work during GridPP5. The objectives of this program will be to improve awareness of the technologies developed by GridPP and its partners in academia and industry, and hence facilitate the increase in use of these technologies within new areas.

Publications

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Description The GridPP Collaboration is a community of particle physicists and computer scientists based in the United Kingdom and at CERN. The purpose of the collaboration is to manage and oversee the evolution of the computing infrastructure needed to maintain the UK's position as world leaders in particle physics. This is done by using and actively contributing to the development of open source software, applications and middleware needed to power large-scale distributed computing for particle physics and beyond. This world leading programme has made major progress in wide ranging areas, understanding the birth, evolution and fate of the Universe, its constituents and the forces between them.
Exploitation Route Grid computing such as the GridPP Collaboration provides a way to bring exceptional computing power to a wide variety of scientific problems. The GridPP computing project provides resources primarily for the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) computing requirements providing infrastructure for particle physics experiments. Additionally the computing capacities of the GridPP are increasingly being used by many non LHC experiments (such as projects funded by the IRIS project www.iris.ac.uk) advancing a wide range of science problems including both other areas of physics and other sciences. Some of the projects utilising GridPP for research outside of particle physics include LSSTC (Astrophysics), ITER (Fusion), PhenoGrid (Theoretical Physics), EPIC (Epidemiology), ENROLLER (language and literature), MoSSaiC (Geography), PRaVDA (Radiotherapy). A longer list of projects supported can be seen on the GridPP website - https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/users/research.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

URL https://www.gridpp.ac.uk
 
Description In addition to the wide range of academic based projects the GridPP supports (www.gridpp.ac.uk/users/research) the GridPP project also provide computing infrastructure to a number of industry orientated projects such as Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (LUCID project), Econophysia, IMENSE, Dell and HP Labs (https://www.gridpp.ac.uk/users/industry). GridPP is part of the UK e-science programme which has been running since 2000 and as such member of the collaboration hold positions in their local and national e-Science centres. The GridPP also works with CERN@school to give students access to computing resources for data analysis, simulation work and introductory coding projects via CERN@school's secondary school projects which give students the opportunity to engage in university-level physics research.
First Year Of Impact 2014
Sector Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)
Impact Types Societal