Communications of the ACM
Computing Grid Built For Physics Benefits a Wide Range of Science
A Z-boson decays within the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN. Large red spikes represent the resulting electron-positron pair. Physicists must sort through trillions of collisions like this to find new elementary particles.
Credit: Matevz Tadel
The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) houses the Open Science Grid, a network that connects processors and data storage owned by an alliance of universities and national laboratories to obtain enough computing power to meet researchers' needs.
San Diego created the grid to handle the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider, but as part of the CMS collaboration, it has contributed to more than 140 additional scientific papers.
The grid offers computing power to projects whose occasional needs prohibit investing in such a resource, and the consortium recently received an additional $27 million in funding to continue to provide software and services to other research projects. One such project is the Protein Data Bank, a worldwide repository for three-dimensional structures of large molecules based at Rutgers University. Protein Data Bank researchers used the Open Science Grid to compare pairs of proteins, looking for structural similarities. Meanwhile, researchers at UCSD's Scripps Whale Acoustics Lab have developed ways of picking out particular sounds from other ocean noises in recordings that can contain as much as 8 TB of data.
From UCSD News (CA)
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