CDF Computing

CDF stands for the Collider Detector at Fermilab. The powerful particle accelerator Tevatron at Fermilab accelerates protons and antiprotons close to the speed of light, and then makes them collide head-on inside the CDF detector. The CDF detector is used to study the products of such collisions, by doing this the scientists are trying to reconstruct what happened in the collision and ultimately try to figure out how matter is put together and what forces nature uses to create the world around us.

The Computing Division provides the critical computing infrastructure for the CDF experiment, including hardware systems, data handling and storage, software tools and database administration. The division also supports raw data archiving, ships data to offline repositories, supports production operations and online system administration. Massive CDF farms have been set up to handle the vast amount of data generated from the experiment. The CDF farm alone consists of over a thousand computer nodes that are connected together for the rapid reconstruction of CDF data and data analysis.

The division is now in the process of migrating computing resources to grid. CDF farms will be an integral part of FermiGrid, which in turn contributes to Open Science Grid. Data movements between off-site computing and on-site data handling systems will proceed via fully grid-compliant mechanisms.

More Information: CDF Offline computing and software , CDF Experiment Home

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Last updated by cdweb on 04/29/2008