IFCA&CMS Tier-2

CMS Tier-2

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva is the largest scientific instrument on the planet. When it begins operations, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyse.

The data from the LHC experiments will be distributed around the globe, according to a four-tiered model. A primary backup will be recorded on tape at CERN, the “Tier-0” centre of LHC Computing Grid (LCG). After initial processing, this data will be distributed to a series of Tier-1 centres, large computer centres with sufficient storage capacity and with round-the-clock support for the Grid.

The Tier-1 centres will make data available to Tier-2 centres, each consisting of one or several collaborating computing facilities, which can store sufficient data and provide adequate computing power for specific analysis tasks.

Individual scientists will access these facilities through Tier-3 computing resources, which can consist of local clusters in a University Department or even individual PCs, and which may be allocated to LCG on a regular basis.

IFCA Participation

The coordinate effort of the two centres involved in this project, IFCA and CIEMAT, together with the addition of material and human own resources, will ease the construction and operation of a Tier-2 with a dimension and quality of services sufficient to considered as such and probably with a great importance towards the experiment. These two laboratories have been already collaborating together in other project within CMS experiment and, together with other Spanish Groups, in computing issues in the LCG-ES project. The close collaboration between both institutions provide the appropriate synergy to build and maintain a Tier-2 centre fulfilling largely the minimal requirements of resources and quality of services set by LCG project and CMS experiment.

Related links:
http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/
http://grid.ifca.es/cms_tier2_[...]