Information Technology Reference
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14,000,000
12,000,000
10,000,000
8,000,000
6,000,000
4,000,000
2,000,000
0
Normalized CPU time kS12k/month
Ops
Other
LHC
32%
FIGURE 3.5
Usage of the EGEE resources.
3.4.1
Large Hadron Collider
Support for processing data coming from the forthcoming Large Hadron
Collider (LHC), a next-generation particle accelerator completing commis-
sioning at CERN, Switzerland, was a major driver in the development of
the EGEE program. The LHC experiments are predicted to produce on the
order of 15 petabytes of data per year, implying a scale of data processing
that made grid technology a natural choice. EGEE works closely with the
Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) collaboration set up to distrib-
ute and process this data. Through the EGEE infrastructure, members of
the global physics community will be able to collaborate on the analysis of
these data, which it is hoped will i nd the Higgs boson, an important step
in the coni rmation of the so-called “standard model” in particle physics.
These LHC experiments also help to stress-test the EGEE infrastructure
due to their large-scale requirements. An example of this is the network
bandwidth needed for the distribution of the LHC data, where the experi-
ments have each demonstrated capacity of 1 petabyte per month transfer,
and aggregate speeds for the LHC experiments have reached 1 gigabyte
per second with real workloads (see
Figure 3.6
).
3.4.2
The WISDOM Initiative
WISDOM (Wide In Silico Docking On Malaria) was launched in 2005 to
use emerging information technologies to search for drugs for Malaria
and other so-called “neglected” diseases. WISDOM works closely with
EGEE, and has made use of the EGEE infrastructure to run a number of
large-scale “data challenges.” These are tests that screen large-scale data-
bases of molecules for potential treatments for disease. The i rst of these
was carried out in summer 2005, when 42 million compounds were
screened for efi cacy against a malarial protein in just 6 weeks. This was
followed by a data challenge looking for potential treatments for the H5N1
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