Worldwide LHC Computing Grid

The Large Hadron Collider will produce roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually – enough to fill more than 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs a year!

Thousands of scientists around the world want to access and analyse this data, so CERN is collaborating with institutions in 34 different countries to operate a distributed computing and data storage infrastructure: the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG).

Data from the LHC experiments is distributed around the globe, with a primary backup recorded on tape at CERN. After initial processing, this data is distributed to eleven large computer centres – in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Spain, Taipei, the UK, and two sites in the USA – with sufficient storage capacity for a large fraction of the data, and with round-the-clock support for the computing grid.

These so-called “Tier-1” centres make the data available to over 160 “Tier-2” centres for specific analysis tasks. Individual scientists can then access the LHC data from their home country, using local computer clusters or even individual PCs.

The WLCG collaborates closely with the other CERN grid projects:

• The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid has been the driving force behind the European multi-science European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), which continues to grow in size and diversity of usage. EGI currently involves more than 240 institutions in 45 countries, supporting science in more than 20 disciplines, including bioinformatics, medical imaging, education, climate change, energy, agriculture and more.


• CERN openlab: The WLCG project also works with industry, in particular through the CERN openlab, where leading IT companies are testing and validating cutting-edge grid technologies using the WLCG environment.