The e-Science Paradigm for Particle Physics
K. Cho · InTech eBooks · 2012
Research in the 21 st century is increasingly driven by the analysis of large amounts of data within the e-Science paradigm.e-Science is the data centric analysis of science experiments unifying experiment, theory, and computing.According to Simon C. Lin and Eric Yen (Lin & Yen, 2009), e-Science or data-intensive science unifies theory, experiment, and simulations using exploration tools that link a network of scientists with their datasets.Results are analyzed using a shared computing infrastructure.In this chapter, we use the concept of e-Science to combine experiment, theory and computing in particle physics in order to achieve a more efficient research process.Particle physics applications are generally regarded as a driver for developing this global e-Science infrastructure.According to Tony Hey at Microsoft (Hey, 2006), thousands of years ago science focused on experiments to describe natural phenomena.In the last few hundreds of years, science became more theoretical.In the last few decades, science has become more computational, focusing on simulations.Today, science can be described as more data-intensive in nature, requiring a combination of experiment, theory, and computing.Attempts have been made to realize this e-Science concept.One e-Science application is the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (WLCG), which realizes Ian Foster's definition of a grid (Foster et al., 2001).The grid is the combination of computing resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal (Cho & Kim, 2009).As the global e-Science infrastructure is rapidly established, we must take advantage of worldwide e-Science progress.Highenergy physics has advanced the e-Science paradigm by successfully unifying experiments, theory, and computing (Cho et al., 2011).We apply the e-Science concept to particle physics and show an example of this paradigm.As shown in Fig. 1, we construct a unified research model of experiment-theory-computing in order to probe the Standard Model and search for new physics.This is not a simple collection of experiments, computing, and theory, but a fusion of research in order to achieve a more efficient research process.We apply this concept to the