Computing Services for LHC: From Clusters to Grids

Abstract

This chapter traces the development of the computing service for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN data analysis over the 10 years prior to the start-up of the accelerator. It explores the main factors that influenced the choice of technology, a data intensive computational Grid, provides a brief explanation of the fundamentals of Grid computing, and records some sof the technical and organisational challenges that had to be overcome to achieve the capacity, performance, and usability requirements of the LHC experiments.