BCNETwork News

March 2006

A TRIUMF for Canada
Canada one of the world's Top 10 sites for global physics projects

by Debbie Lawes
(CANARIE article)

CA*net 4 is helping to put Canada on the global map for the largest particle physics experiment ever undertaken.

It is also giving the country an opportunity to take an early lead in a new communications revolution that, within a decade, could be as prevalent as the World Wide Web is today.

TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics in Vancouver, has been selected as one of only 10 Tier 1 computing sites for the $3.5-billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the most powerful instrument ever built to investigate the fundamental properties of matter.

"Being a Tier 1 site is a major accomplishment for Canada," says Dr. Michel Vetterli, a researcher at Simon Fraser University and TRIUMF.
"Not only does it demonstrate our ability to carry our own weight in international projects, but as a Tier 1 centre, Canadian researchers will have better access to the data, including a seat at the table in deciding how the data gets processed."

Located in Geneva, Switzerland at the CERN particle physics laboratory, an experiment called ATLAS will begin observing the first proton-proton collisions for the LHC in 2007. It will generate an average of 3 Petabytes of data annually.

"It would take about 4.5 million CDs to store this much data, which if stacked up would be ten CN Towers high," explains Dr. Vetterli.
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To process this volume of data, CERN is setting up an international network of high performance computing centres in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Japan and elsewhere that will be linked by CA*net 4 and other high-speed research networks.

In total, about 130,000 computer processors at some 150 universities and research labs worldwide will be connected to this system, all providing some degree of processing capability.

Gigabit-speed lightpaths provided by CANARIE will also enable TRIUMF to receive between four-to-five per cent of raw data from CERN, and to share these data with some 1,500 physicists around the world in real-time as the experiment is happening.

Data will travel from CERN in Geneva, across the Atlantic Ocean, through CANARIE's networking hub in New York and then to British Columbia. From there, TRIUMF will transmit data for further processing and analysis to Tier 2 sites, one in eastern and one in western Canada involving several universities and institutions.

CANARIE is working closely with TRIUMF to have connectivity in place by the end of December. The computing infrastructure for the LHC will be operating by next April, with each Tier 1 site ramping up to full data throughout by April 2007.

While the ATLAS experiment represents an unprecedented opportunity to understand the physics of our universe, it is also placing Canada at the forefront of grid computing and advanced networks - areas that Dr. Vetterli contends will be as mainstream within 5-to-10 years as the world wide web is today.

"I think grid computing is at a similar stage as the Internet was in the early 1990s. In the not too distant future, people will be able to log onto these grids, providing general access to enormous resources for large-scale computations and data storage. "The ATLAS experiment is giving Canada a unique opportunity to be on the cutting edge of these advances."