Global Petascale Systems for Frontier Science at the LHC and the Future of Data Intensive Clouds

Physicists and engineers working at the Large Hadron Collider to find the most fundamental constituents of matter and Nature's most basic forces have developed unprecedented global-scale Grid systems, networks and autonomous monitoring infrastructures capable of distributing, processing and supporting the collaborative data analysis of 100 Petabyte datasets, rising to an Exabyte within the next few years. We will review the architecture of these systems, and the progress in achieving 100 gigabit/sec throughput over continental and transoceanic networks, and discuss the implications and opportunities for future cloud systems, and supporting technologies, involving the exchange of data on much larger aggregate scales in the future, where optical networks will support 1, 10 and later 100 gigabit/sec links to homes and businesses on every continent.

Panelists:

• Dr. Harvey Newman, Professor of Physics at California Institute of Technology
• Dr. Iosif Charles Legrand, Senior Research Engineer, California Institute of Technology
• Dr. Dorian Kcira, Researcher, California Institute of Technology, High Energy Physics & Center for Advanced Computing Research
• Bob Koche, Vice President of Business Development, Evogh, Inc.

Bios

Harvey Newman

Harvey Newman (Sc. D, MIT 1974) is a Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and has been a faculty member at Caltech since 1982. He co-led the MARK J Collaboration that discovered the gluon at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg in 1979. His current activities include searches for the Higgs particles, supersymmetry, and other exotic new particles with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and measurements of neutrino oscillations with the MINOS and NOvA experiments at Fermilab. Between 1998 and 2008 he served as the Chair of the Collaboration Board of the U.S. contingent of CMS. He now serves as Chair of the US LHC Users Organization, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and serves as Chair of the APS Forum on International Physics.

In addition to his roles in physics discoveries over the last 40 years, and leadership roles in CMS and the US LHC Users Organization, Newman has had a leading role in the strategic planning, development, operation and management of international networks and collaborative systems serving the High Energy and Nuclear Physics communities since 1982, and served on the Technical Advisory Group for the NSFNet in 1986. He now represents the LHC and the science research community on the Internet2 Architecture and Operations Advisory Council. Newman leads the international consortium that won the SC2003, SC2004, SC2005 and SC2009 Bandwidth Challenge Awards, with a 2005 record of 151 Gigabits/sec, and subsequent storage-to-storage wide area and metro-distance marks of 119 Gbps and 200 Gbps in 2008-9, as well as a new wide area mark of 186 Gbps sustained at SC2011 in November 2011.

As Chair of the ICFA Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity since 2002, he has worked to develop and provide effective high performance networking for CMS and the HEP community. In recent years he has devoted himself to foster greater equality of access to CMS groups working in many regions of the world, through the development of modern network and grid infrastructures, Tier2 center development, and tools for large scale data transfer, monitoring and management. This includes collaborations with groups at UERJ in Rio de Janeiro, and at USP/UNESP in Sao Paulo, the RNP national network in Brazil, and the Sao Paulo regional network ANSP, as well as groups in Mexico, Pakistan, India, Romania, Slovakia and China. As a result of this work he was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa degrees by the Politechnica University in Bucharest, Romania, and Pavel Jozef Safarik University in Kosice, Slovakia in 2007, and the “Jose Bonifacio” medal of the State University of Rio de Janeiro in 2009.

Iosif Legrand

Iosif Legrand is a senior research engineer at the California Institute of Technology since 1998. He received an MS in nuclear engineering from University of Bucharest in 1884 and a PhD in theoretical physics from the National Institute of Atomic Physics – Bucharest in 1991. His current activities include simulation, monitoring, control and optimization for complex, distributed systems. He is the technology coordinator for several software projects in distributed computing developed by the Caltech group for the High Energy Physics community: MonALISA- Monitoring Agents using a Large Integrated Services Architecture, VINCI - Virtual Intelligent Networks for Computing Infrastructures, the MONARC simulation framework and the FDT – Fast Data Transfer system.

Bob Koche

Bob Koche is a veteran of Silicon Valley from Apple, Intel and 3Com. He has been instrumental in the creation of many new product and service categories from innovative devices including the original Mac, Pentium and Ethernet card to cloud platforms from Salesforce.com and Google. Bob is currently Vice President of Business Development for Evogh who is the first cloud-based, HD video conferencing service that offers meetings “by the slice” (read no contracts).

Dorian Kcira

Dorian Kcira is a physicist who joined Caltech in 2008 and is working in the High Energy Physics Group and the Center for Advanced Computing Research. He received his PhD at the University of Hamburg and the DESY, Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron. He worked at the University of Louvain in Belgium and the European Center for High Energy Physics (CERN) on the Silicon Strip Tracker and the High Level Trigger of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment. He presently works on the Caltech CMS Tier2 Center at Caltech, which is part of the Large Hadron Collider grid.

- by Professor Harvey Newman