The UK’s particle physics community is building a vast, distributed computing network to handle the flood of data from the Large Hadron Collider and other major experiments. Without this infrastructure, researchers would be unable to process the petabytes of collision data needed to search for new particles or test fundamental theories of matter and the universe. This project operates a high-throughput computational service that delivers large-scale computing power to UK physicists. It sustains the UK’s commitment to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, ensuring that British scientists can participate in global discoveries. The same infrastructure also supports dozens of other scientific communities—from neutrino experiments to astronomy projects—making it a cost-effective backbone for the wider research ecosystem. The work is fundamentally about enabling discovery. It does not aim for an immediate practical application. Instead, it provides the invisible digital machinery that allows fundamental science to happen at scale. Past investments in such grid computing have already transformed how scientists collaborate globally, and this project will keep the UK at the centre of that effort.
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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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