HEPnet Canada

The Large Hadron Colider (LHC) at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland will began colliding protons in 2008. These collisions will be recorded by four large detectors. Canada, in particular, has focused its efforts on the ATLAS detector. ATLAS, like the other detectors, will produce a volume of data (many 10’s of petabytes) that cannot be stored or analyzed entirely at one institution. Instead the data will be distributed around the world to a hierarchy of computing centres. In order to effectively use these centres, a high performance network is required.

TRIUMF (Canada's National Accelerator Labratory) is a ATLAS Tier-1 computing centre and there are several Tier-2 computing centres distributed through Canada. To service these various centres a network of lightpath has been created collectively forming the ATLAS Canada Network.