As it is well-known, Grid Technologies have emerged so rapidly because of the developments originated inside the High Energy Physics (HEP) community. Several years ago, due to the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN, Switzerland, the researchers foresaw a huge amount of data to be stored and a much higher computational power to be reached in order to rule such a big experiment and profit from its capabilities. Thus, Grid was born.

LHC is built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference, which is buried around 50 to 175 m underground, and it counts on four detectors designed to study different HEP properties: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. All these experiments have developed and deployed their own Grid specifications even when they also share many middleware modules. For example, they have created specific Virtual Organizations (VO) and VO_Boxes which rule the management of jobs and services.

As a consequence, they have been incorporated to EUMEDGRID and still supported by EUMEDGRID Support, but respecting their characteristics, so some services such as monitoring, submission and retrievals of jobs, etc. must be done using the modules provided by the ICT groups from the different experiments. This is, they use the EUMEDGRID Support infrastructure for calculations and storage, but not its VO eumed.

If the reader wants to find information about the production of the LHC experiments inside EUMEDGRID Support, he/she can consult the available monitoring tools for ALICE (MonALISA), ATLAS (AGIS, Dashboard), CMS (Dashboard), LHCb (DIRAC). These tools depict the information related to the whole experiment production, but in addition to this, there are also some EUMEDGRID Support groups that study particular physical problems related to the experiment, but in a Grid environment different from the official one.

HEP VOs accepted by EUMNEDGRID Support sites

The table below shows a list of EUMEDGRID Support sites with the respective HEP VO accepted by them. That list was obtained by querying the EUMEDGRD Support BDII on Apr 27th 2011.

$ lcg-infosites --vo <alice|atlas|auger|cms|lhcb> ce --is bdii.eumedgrid.eu