GridPP

GridPP is a collaboration of particle physicists and computer scientists from the United Kingdom and CERN. They manage and maintain a distributed computing grid across the UK with the primary aim of providing resources to particle physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN. They are funded by the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council. The collaboration oversees a major computing facility called the Tier1 at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) along with the four Tier 2 organisations of ScotGrid, NorthGrid, SouthGrid and LondonGrid (formerly LT2). The Tier 2s are geographically distributed and are composed of computing clusters at multiple institutes.

As of 2012 the GridPP infrastructure spans 18 UK institutions and is major partner in the UK's National Grid Initiative as a part of the European Grid Infrastructure.

The original GridPP plan was drawn up in late 2000 to provide the UK's contribution to the LHC Computing Grid and the EuropeanDataGrid project (now the European Grid Infrastructure). The drive behind these projects was to provide researchers working on the LHC experiments with suitable computing resources and to extend the use of the technology to other communities. The first GridPP proposal was accepted by PPARC, at the time the UK funding council responsible for funding particle physics related projects, and the collaboration officially began on 1 September 2001 with £17m of funding. During this first phase of GridPP (2001 to 2004) the collaboration built the UK testbed, a working prototype for a grid that was linked to other similar systems around the world. In preparation for its use as a production infrastructure it analysed real data from a wide variety of experiments being run around the world in different institutions. In 2004 it was extended till September 2007 to bring it up to the proposed LHC switch on date. By 2007 GridPP was a fully functioning production service but the LHC switch on was still a year away so in September 2007 it received a further extension from STFC, receiving £30m of funding until March 2011.

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