Every second, the Large Hadron Collider generates enough data to fill hundreds of thousands of DVDs—and a UK-wide computing grid must process it all without crashing. This project funds the staff at Queen Mary University of London who operate that grid, part of the international GridPP collaboration. Without this work, UK particle physicists would lose access to the raw data from LHC experiments, effectively shutting them out of discoveries about the fundamental structure of matter. The grid also supports 28 other scientific communities—from dark matter detectors like LUX-ZEPLIN to neutrino experiments like DUNE and T2K, plus astronomy projects—by providing computing power they could not afford on their own. If the grid runs reliably, UK scientists can continue analysing LHC collision data through 2028, contributing to discoveries about the Higgs boson, dark matter, and the early universe. This is fundamental science: it does not produce a marketable product tomorrow. But the distributed computing infrastructure itself—a system that moves petabytes of data between dozens of sites worldwide—has already influenced cloud computing and big-data methods used in industry and medicine. The immediate payoff is knowledge; the long-term payoff is the infrastructure and trained people that make future breakthroughs possible.
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This proposal, submitted in response to the 2022 invitation from STFC, aims to provide and operate a computing Grid for the exploitation of LHC data in the UK. The success of the current GridPP Collaboration will be built upon, and the UK's response to production of LHC data in the period April 2024 to March 2028 will be to ensure that there is a sustainable infrastructure providing "Distributed Computing for Particle Physics" We propose to operate a distributed high throughput computational service as the main mechanism for delivering very large-scale computational resources to the UK particle physics community. This foundation will underpin the success and increase the discovery potential of UK physicists. We will operate a production-quality service, delivering robustness, scale and functionality. The proposal is fully integrated with international projects and we must exploit the opportunity to capitalise on the UK leadership already established in several areas. The Particle Physics distributed computing service will increasingly be integrated with national and international initiatives. GridPP fulfills a subsidiary objective of delivering resources to non-LHC (and non-HEP) groups, partly as a provider to the IRIS consortium. The infrastructure supports work from 34 Virtual Organisations, representing 28 communities including DUNE, NA62, PhenoGrid, ILC, CLAS12, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), T2K, SNO+, CTA, HyperK and LSST, and most recently has supported several astronomy projects. The extension of LHC computing to host these communities has been a cost-effective way to support the wider Particle Physics community and the wider STFC community. The project will be managed across various domains and will deliver the UK's commitment to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and ensure that worldwide activities directly benefit the UK.
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