CERN, Switzerland

I have been involved in the development and management of the central computing services at CERN since 1974, taking a very active part in the evolution from super-computers through general purpose mainframes to clusters of RISC workstations and finally (at least for now) to PC-based computing fabrics. Recently my specialisation has been in the area of large-scale data handling for physics analysis - particularly the hardware and software of storage systems, and cluster management. I was involved from an early stage in planning the data handling services for the experiments that will use CERN's new accelerator - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The very larger computing requirements for LHC experiments have led to a current interest in Computational and Data Grids - which we hope will enable us to unite the power of giant computing clusters and storage facilities at CERN and other High Energy Physics data centres around the world. I currently lead the LHC Computing Grid Project, set up in 2001 to prepare the computing environment for LHC. The project includes the development and support of the common tools, libraries and frameworks required by the physics applications, the preparation of the computing facility at CERN, and the coordination and operation of the global LHC Grid.