GIOD Project Overview
The LHC experiments have designed Computing Models based on worldwide distributed storage, and access to event data by the use of large Object Database Management Systems (ODBMS) at CERN, and at Regional Centres.
Regional Centres serve groups of collaborating institutes in one or a few nations that enjoy very high bandwidth connectivity with CERN, where the raw experimental data are accumulated.
The models represent an unprecedented challenge for data storage, access and networking computing technology.
The challenge extends to the entire Object Oriented software development task, a task which must ensure that the software correctly implements and utilises the known relationships between the HEP objects stored in the ODBMS.
The purpose of the GIOD Project is to construct a large-scale prototype of a Regional Centre based around the Hewlett Packard Exemplar SPP2000, on which will be installed an ODBMS, the High Performance Storage Management System (HPSS), and high bandwidth Wide Area Networks (WANs).
A complete LHC software environment also will be installed and evaluated during the project, and production simulation work will be carried out. To address the networking aspects of the challenge, tests of the SPP2000 together with other large-scale peer systems over the WAN will be made, so providing better predictions of how Central and remote computing centres might interoperate on a global scale.