GridPP6 Glasgow Staff Grant

This proposal, submitted in response to the 2018 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 2020 to March 2024 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 2020, the UK Grid infrastructure will have expanded in size to 77,000 cores, with more than 54 PetaBytes of storage. This will enable the UK to exploit, in an internationally competitive way, the unique physics potential of the LHC.

GridPP has built a track record of impactful activities for more than a decade and this will continue through the GridPP 6 project. While the primary beneficiaries of our work are those working on the scientific exploitation of the vast amounts of data being produced by the Large Hadron Collider experiments, broader impact arises from our activities. We continue to help broaden community engagement with large-scale computing, making GridPP resources and support available to non-LHC projects and participating in the STFC IRIS consortium. We support training for work experience students, interns, sandwich students, apprentices and early careers graduates as well as providing professional development for GridPP funded staff that will enhance their future value to UK enterprises. GridPP staff will contribute to public outreach and engagement through continued support and participation in STFC events, direct support for science and computing in school and outreach to the general public, for example at festivals and conferences. We also support innovation through close collaboration with commercial and industrial partners, for example through our participation in open source collaborations such as the CEPH foundation.