US Grid projects

The Major US projects relevant to the STFC programme are:

International Virtual Datagrid laboratory (iVDgL) (link opens in a new window)

$15M project funded by NFS ($13.7) and several US Universities ($2M) to develop the infrastructure for large scale grid computing projects. The main projects foreseen at present are Atlas, CMS, LIGO, NVO and SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey), though applications from biology and engineering are actively being sought. The focus of the project is on provision of computing resources and their support. The project is explicitly intended to be international with links to projects in Japan, Australia and Europe (EDG, GridPP and UK Core Programme). The project is closely associated with the GriPhyn project, with an integrated managment team. Grid architecture and software will be taken from the GriPhyn and DataGrid projects, with the EDG also expected to contribute basic technologies and tools.

IVDgL includes an operations centre based at Indiana University to provide coordinated monitoring and management of the grid infrastructure.

Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) (link opens in a new window)

$11M NSF funded project to develop the software required to build and operate large scale data grids. A collaboration of physicists and computer scientists, the project is focused on providing solutions for Atlas, CMS, LIGO and SDSS. Specifically the project aims to develop:

• advanced methods of characterizing, validating and archiving software components, to implement virtual data manipulations.
• policy driven planning and scheduling of networked data and computational resources.
• management of transactions and task execution across national and worldwide virtual organisations

DataGrid (link opens in a new window)

DoE funded three year project to develop data grid services. Focuses on taking existing best practices from computer science and integrating/developing them for the benefit of running particle and nuclear physics experiments.

National Virtual Observatory (NVO) (link opens in a new window)

NSF funded project to develop the first phase of a national virtual observatory. Objectives are similar to AstroGrid. The NVO project aims to collaborate closely with similar projects, such as AstroGrid, in other countries.

DoE Science Grid

DoE project to develop a large scale grid infrastructure (probably based around DoE labs) similar to that being developed by GriPhyN. The Science Grid is intended to support several applications in science and engineering including simulations required to achieve real time super-novae detection.

LHC T1 Centres

Two US funded LHC tier-1 computing centres; for Atlas (Fermilab) and CMS (Argonne).

Other significant US projects include:

Particle Physics Data Grid(PPDG) (link opens in a new window)