Particle physics experiments present significant technical challenges, which require us to collaborate with colleagues in other disciplines to develop new cutting-edge technologies. We are contributing to a variety of forefront cyber-infrastructure research and developement projects.

The next generation of experiments in elementary particle physics will require peta-scale cyber-infrastructure: they will generate petabytes of data a year and require petaflops of computing to analyze this data. This group is co-leading the development and operation of the Vanderbilt shared high performance computing facility ACCRE.

The (peta-scale) computing and data storage resources and the physicists of elementary particle physics experiments will be geographically dispersed (internationally). To maximize the quality and rate of scientific discovery by these physicists, all must have equal ability to access and analyze the experiment's data. We are collaborating on the Open Science Grid (OSG), International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL), and Skim Grid Portal projects. The notion of a globally integrated computation and information resource has been termed the computational data grid, or grid for short. The grid will connect the world's computers, databases, instruments, and people in a seamless web, supporting computation-rich applications such as wide-area high performance computing, real-time widely distributed instruments, and data mining.

This research group is playing a leadership role on the RTES project, a team of high energy physicists and computer scientists from four universities and Fermilab investigating real-time embedded systems that are high performance, heterogeneous, fault-tolerant, and fault-adaptive. One of the applications that is driving this research and providing a test platform for it is the trigger and data acquisition system for the elementary particle physics experiment CMS.