Four Decades of Computing in Subnuclear Physics - from Bubble Chamber to LHC

This manuscript addresses selected aspects of computing for the reconstruction and simulation of particle interactions in subnuclear physics. Based on personal experience with experiments at DESY and at CERN, I cover the evolution of computing hardware and software from the era of track chambers where interactions were recorded on photographic film up to the LHC experiments with their multi-million electronic channels

A First Step Towards Automatically Building Network Representations

To fully harness Grids, users or middlewares must have some knowledge on the topology of the platform interconnection network. As such knowledge is usually not available, one must uses tools which automatically build a topological network model through some measurements. In this article, we define a methodology to assess the quality of these network model building tools, and we apply this methodology to representatives of the main classes of model builders and to two new algorithms. We show that none of the main existing techniques build models that enable to accurately predict the running time of simple application kernels for actual platforms. However some of the new algorithms we propose give excellent results in a wide range of situations

A perspective on the Healthgrid initiative

This paper presents a perspective on the Healthgrid initiative which involves European projects deploying pioneering applications of grid technology in the health sector. In the last couple of years, several grid projects have been funded on health related issues at national and European levels. A crucial issue is to maximize their cross fertilization in the context of an environment where data of medical interest can be stored and made easily available to the different actors in healthcare, physicians, healthcare centres and administrations, and of course the citizens. The Healthgrid initiative, represented by the Healthgrid association (http://www.healthgrid.org), was initiated to bring the necessary long term continuity, to reinforce and promote awareness of the possibilities and advantages linked to the deployment of GRID technologies in health. Technologies to address the specific requirements for medical applications are under development. Results from the DataGrid and other projects are given as examples of early applications.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Accepted by the Second International Workshop on Biomedical Computations on the Grid, at the 4th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2004). Chicago USA, April 200

Leveraging simulation practice in industry through use of desktop grid middleware

This chapter focuses on the collaborative use of computing resources to support decision making in industry. Through the use of middleware for desktop grid computing, the idle CPU cycles available on existing computing resources can be harvested and used for speeding-up the execution of applications that have “non-trivial” processing requirements. This chapter focuses on the desktop grid middleware BOINC and Condor, and discusses the integration of commercial simulation software together with free-to-download grid middleware so as to offer competitive advantage to organizations that opt for this technology. It is expected that the low-intervention integration approach presented in this chapter (meaning no changes to source code required) will appeal to both simulation practitioners (as simulations can be executed faster, which in turn would mean that more replications and optimization is possible in the same amount of time) and the management (as it can potentially increase the return on investment on existing resources)