Abstract:
The GriPhyN (Grid Physics Network) project brings together an outstanding team of information technology (IT) researchers and experimental physicists to provide the IT advances required to enable Petabyte-scale data intensive science in the 21st century. Driving the project are unprecedented requirements for geographically dispersed extraction of complex scientific information from very large collections of measured data. To meet these requirements, which arise initially from the four physics experiments involved in this project but will also be fundamental to science and commerce in the 21st century, the GriPhyN team will pursue IT advances centered on the creation of Petascale Virtual Data Grids (PVDG) that meet the data-intensive computational needs of a diverse community of thousands of scientists spread across the globe.
Our team is composed of seven IT research groups and members of four NSF-funded frontier physics experiments. We believe that only an integrated research effort will provide the coordination and tight feedback from prototypes and tests that will enable both communities to meet their goals. The four physics experiments are about to enter a new era of exploration of the fundamental forces of nature and the structure of the universe. The CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider will search for the origins of mass and probe matter at the smallest length scales; LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) will detect the gravitational waves of pulsars, supernovae and in-spiraling binary stars; and SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) will carry out an automated sky survey enabling systematic studies of stars, galaxies, nebulae, and large-scale structure. |
