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ing system of single HPC centre (DEISA, 2009).
DEISA incorporates several different platforms
and operating systems, for example, Cray XT4/5
(Linux), IBM Power5 (AIX), IBM Power6 (AIX,
Linux), IBM BlueGene/P (Linux), IBM PowerPC
(Linux), SGI ALTIX 4700 (Linux), NEC SX8/9
vector systems (Super UX). The middleware de-
ployed on the DEISA resources enable transparent
access to distributed resources, high performance
data sharing at European scale, and transparent
job migration across similar platforms.
Above and beyond the research DEISA has
empowered and hopes to stimulate, its most
important contribution may well be the extent to
which it has prepared the ground for the future
development of Europe's supercomputing capa-
bilities. Since DEISA started just four and a half
years ago, the aggregated peak computing power
it can offer has multiplied by a factor of 300, from
30 Teraflops (30 thousand billion floating point
operations per second) to over a Petaflop (a million
billion operations per second) (ICT Results, 2009).
particle physics goes on to describe the workings
of the Universe” (CERN LHC, 2009).
The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG)
provides the computation and storage resources
for the four LHC particle physics experiments.
WLCG is a global collaboration of more than
170 computing centres in 34 countries and aims
to harness the power of 100,000 CPUs distributed
among the computing centres to process, analyse
and store data produced from the LHC, making
it equally available to all partners, regardless of
their physical location (CERN WLCG, 2009).
GÉANT provides global communications support
for WLCG. The experiments at CERN depends on
the high speed GÉANT links around the globe for
seamless transmission of unprecedented amounts
of data (15 million Gigabytes/year) to 5,000
scientists working in 500 institutes worldwide.
FEDERICA: Implementing
Experimental Network Infrastructure
The Federated E-infrastructure Dedicated to
European Researchers Innovating in Comput-
ing network Architectures (FEDERICA, 2009)
is a networking project funded by the EU's 7th
Framework Programme that aims to implement an
experimental network infrastructure for trialling
new networking technologies. The project started
on 1
st
January 2008 and the project duration is 30
months. The FEDERICA infrastructure is com-
posed of contributions of Gigabit circuits, trans-
mission equipment and computing nodes from
ten participating NRENs, namely,
Consortium
GARR
(Italy),
CESNET
(Czech Republic),
DFN
(Germany),
FCCN
(Portugal),
GRNET
(Greece),
NIIF
(Hungary),
PSNC
(Poland),
RedIris
(Spain),
SWITCH
(Switzerland) and
HEAnet
(Hungary),
and the pan-European GÉANT network.
FEDERICA uses virtualisation in computing
and network systems to create a technology agnos-
tic and neutral infrastructure that makes it is pos-
sible to create “slices” of the infrastructure as per
the user's request, wherein each slice comprising
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
Project: The World's Largest
Scientific Experiment
The LHC project features the world's largest and
the most powerful particle accelerator and four
state-of-the-art particle physics collision detec-
tors (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb). The four
LHC experiments, named after the four collision
detectors, are designed to be able to study particle
physics under conditions well beyond any other
previous experiment (Lamanna, 2004). The LHC
experiments are the single largest scientific experi-
ment ever undertaken. Its purpose is to recreate the
conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding two
beams of hadrons (subatomic particles) head-on at
very high energy. “There are many theories as to
what will result from these collisions, but what's
for sure is that a brave new world of physics will
emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in
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