The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (worldwide LCG)

The world's largest scientific machine is scheduled to enter production in the second half of 2007-roughly one year from the time of this conference. In order to exploit the scientific potential of this machine, computational resources way beyond those which have been deployed for previous accelerators are required. Given these requirements-and the impracticality of providing such resources in a central place-a distributed solution based on Grid technologies has been developed. This paper describes the overall requirements that come from the Computing Models of the experiments, the state of deployment of the production services, on-going validation of these services as well as the offline infrastructure of the experiments and finally the remaining steps that need to be achieved in the remaining months before the deluge of data arrives. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.