Session HC - Particle Physics Invited Session.
INVITED session, Friday morning, November 01
Ballroom B, Auburn University Hotel/Dixon Conference Center
Twenty-first century scientific and engineering enterprises are increasingly characterized by their geographic dispersion and their reliance on large data archives, some of which are reaching the petabyte (10^15 bytes) scale. These characteristics bring with them unique challenges. First, the increasing size and complexity of modern data collections require significant investments in information technologies to store, retrieve and analyze them. Second, the increased distribution of people and resources in these projects has made resource sharing and collaboration across significant geographic and organizational boundaries critical to their success.
I discuss in my talk how computing infrastructures based on Data Grids offer data intensive enterprises a comprehensive, scalable framework for collaboration and resource sharing. Interestingly, the most exciting and far ranging of these Data Grid projects are led by collaborations of physicists and computer scientists in support of experiments with massive, near-term data needs. I review several of these Grid projects and their current status. The experience gained with these new information systems, providing transparent managed access to massive distributed data collections, will be applicable to large-scale data-intensive problems in a wide spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines, and eventually in industry and commerce.