Computers are used to solve many scientific and engineering problems, such as diagnosing medical conditions, controlling industrial equipment, weather forecasting, discovering new particles in high energy physics and many others. It is increasingly necessary more computational power and storage capacity to solve these problems, and grid computing emerged as an important field that allows to solve computationally complex problems.

 

Currently we are part of two important grid collaborations: EELA and WLCG.

EELA (E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America) is a consortium formed by 78 institutions from Latinamerica and Europe and its purpose is to build a high capacity, production-quality, scalable grid facility, providing round-the-clock, worldwide access to distributed computing, storage and network resources.

In this collaboration, we have contributed with the development of a grid application, together Universidad de la Frontera. This application is a prototype that allows to process biomedical images in order to identify specific patterns and structures.

 

WLCG is a global collaboration of more than 170 computing centres in 34 countries. The main purpose of the WLCG is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

ATLAS is one of the particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN that is exploring the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe. This experiment will generate enormous amount of data (about 10 Petabytes per year) and it uses grid computing in order to handle such huge amount of data. ATLAS computing model is based on a grid infrastructure that uses a set of hierarchical tiers, and we are contributing with a modest resource center, providing 44 cores and 5 TB of storage capacity. Currently we are working on the improvement of the resource center capacities.

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