INTRODUCTION: SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION AT THE HIGH-ENERGY FRONTIER The major high-energy physics (HEP) experiments of the next twenty years will break new ground in our understanding of the fundamental interactions, structures and symmetries that govern the nature of matter and space-time. Among the principal goals are to find the mechanism responsible for mass in the universe, and the ‘Higgs’ particles associated with mass generation, as well as the fundamental mechanism that led to the predominance of matter over antimatter in the observable cosmos. The largest collaborations today, such as CMS [1] and ATLAS [2] who are building experiments for CERN’s Large. | 39 Data-intensive Grids for high-energy physics Julian J. Bunn and Harvey B. Newman California Institute of Technology Pasadena California United States INTRODUCTION SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION AT THE HIGH-ENERGY FRONTIER The major high-energy physics HEP experiments of the next twenty years will break new ground in our understanding of the fundamental interactions structures and symmetries that govern the nature of matter and space-time. Among the principal goals are to find the mechanism responsible for mass in the universe and the Higgs particles associated with mass generation as well as the fundamental mechanism that led to the predominance of matter over antimatter in the observable cosmos. The largest collaborations today such as CMS 1 and ATLAS 2 who are building experiments for CERN s Large Hadron Collider LHC program 3 each encompass 2000 physicists from 150 institutions in more than 30 countries. Each of these collaborations include 300 to 400 physicists in the US from more than 30 universities as well as the major US HEP laboratories. The current generation of operational experiments at SLAC BaBar 4 Fermilab D0 5 and CDF 6 as well as the experiments at the Relativistic Grid Computing - Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality. Edited by F. Berman A. Hey and G. Fox 2003 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBN 0-470-85319-0 860 JULIAN J. BUNN AND HARVEY B. NEWMAN Heavy Ion Collider RHIC program at Brookhaven National Laboratory BNL 7 face similar challenges. BaBar in particular has already accumulated datasets approaching a petabyte 1PB 1015 Bytes . Collaborations on this global scale would not have been attempted if the physicists could not plan on excellent networks to interconnect the physics groups throughout the life cycle of the experiment and to make possible the construction of Data Grids capable of providing access processing and analysis of massive datasets. These datasets will increase in size from petabytes to exabytes 1EB 1018 Bytes within the next .
