*The colloquium will be in English, the event is open to the public, light refreshments will be served after the talk.

Abstract
In order to manage the unprecedented volumes of data generated by the experiments and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, a globally distributed computing infrastructure has been developed and implemented – the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). This infrastructure today comprises 170 collaborating computing centres providing computing and storage resources to the LHC experiments, and was instrumental in enabling the rapid discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. This talk will describe the infrastructure and the performance in handling the largest scientific data sets in the world. In the coming years the LHC itself and the experiments will undergo significant upgrades that will challenge the computing beyond what technology advances are likely to bring. These challenges will be discussed, and some ideas of how they can be met will be described. Over the next decade similar challenges will be faced by other fields of science and some of the work done for the LHC could also help in those areas.

Ian Bird is the head of the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, a system which allows scientists to share computer power and analyse the colossal amounts of data flowing from CERN's particle accelerator.

About The Speaker:
Ian Bird is currently the LHC Computing Grid Project Leader, and has line management responsibility in the CERN IT Department for Physics Computing activities.  He joined CERN in 2002 to participate in the LCG project as Grid Deployment Area manager with responsibility for building up and deploying the LCG service.  When the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project began in 2004 he also took on the role of EGEE Operations Manager responsible for deploying, operating, and supporting the EGEE grid infrastructure. Prior to joining CERN he spent 6 years at Jefferson Lab in Virginia, USA, where he was head of the computing group and responsible for all aspects of computing for the laboratory.

His background and Ph.D. are in particle physics, having spent many years coordinating the software and computing for the CERN muon experiments studying nucleon structure functions and later in the Nomad neutrino experiment.

Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This event is part of the CyI Colloquium Series.  View all CyI events.