The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two General Purpose Detectors currently underconstruction for the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. The detector design goals are to have a good muon tracking system with redundant layers, an electromagnetic calorimeter with excellent energy resolution (homogeneous crystals), high quality central tracking detector and a hermetic hadron calorimeter with good enery resolution. More details, plus photographs and drawings of the detector, can be found at the CMS link on the navigation bar at the top of this page.

As with many modern particle physics esperiments operating at colliding beam accelerator facilities the raw data taking rate is enormous. AT the LHC the bunches of coutercirculating protons (7 TeV beam energy) will collide every 25 ns (40 MHz). After throwing away all the detector signals which are very small ("zero suppression") we will have about 1 Mbyte of data per beam crossing. A complex trigger system, which searches for the signature of interesting events, will further reduce the rate written to permanent storage to around 100 Mbytes per second. At this rate CMS will produce about 1Pbyte of data per year for physics analysis. In order to deal with this quantity of highly complex data we need massive amounts of computing power; this will be provided by following the GRID computing paradigm. On the pages of this site you can find out more about some of the work being carried out to develop GRID computing for CMS. The emphasis is on work taking place in the UK (or coordinated by UK people), particularly that funded by PPARC in the GRIDPP collaboration.

The CMS groups in the UK who are members of GRDIPP are located at the University of Bristol, Brunel University and Imperial College London and CCLRC RAL. RAL also provides the UK particle physics community, including CMS, with a Tier 1/A Grid centre..