IST Lunch Bunch
Annenberg 105
Global Networks for High Energy Physics, Research and Education in the LHC Era
Harvey Newman,
Professor of Physics,
Caltech,
Wide area networks of global reach and rapidly increasing capacity and capability, have been a key
to major scientific breakthroughs, including the discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012. As we pass
from network generation to generation, the bandwidth needs of the scientific community have grown
by more than two orders of magnitude in the last decade, keeping pace with the exponential growth of
major continental and transoceanic network infrastructures serving research and education. With the
opening of the Large Hadron Collider era the outlook is for similar growth, and the development of more
pervasive intelligent network systems to access and distribute 1 to 100 Petabyte-scale datasets, supporting
the work of thousands of physicists and students in all corners of the globe as they search for the next
round of discoveries. Physicists working with network engineers and computer scientists have learned
to use networks effectively in the 10 Gigabit/sec and more recently the 100 Gigabit/sec range, and have
developed new data transfer methods and architectures, and the ability to allocate and schedule bandwidth
channels dynamically, placing them among the leading developers of global networks. I will review the
LHC experiments' changing Computing Models, the growth and qualitative changes in network needs,
and similar trends in other fields of "data intensive science". I will give an update on the status and outlook
for the world's research networks, technology advances focused on the transition to the next generation of
network circuits and emerging modes of data transmission, and I will touch on the problem of the Digital
Divide, based on the recent work of ICFA's Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity (SCIC).
For more information, please contact Sydney Garstang by phone at 626-395-4555 or by email at sydney@caltech.edu.
Event Series
IST Lunch Bunch
Event Sponsors