BARI: Marcello Castellano, Maria D’Amato, Domenico Di Bari, Rosanna Fini, Alfredo Loconsole, Giorgio Maggi, Emanuele Magno, Vito Manzari, Sergio Natali, Giacomo Piscitelli, Lucia Silvestris, Giuseppe Zito.

BOLOGNA: F. Anselmo, G. Cara Romeo, Marisa Luvisetto, Paolo Capiluppi, Franco Semeria, Claudio Grandi, Umberto Marconi, Domenico Galli, Paolo Mazzanti, GianPiero Siroli.

CAGLIARI: Alessandro De Falco, Alberto Masoni, Giovanna Puddu, Gianluca Usai, Antonio Silvestri

CATANIA: Franco Barbanera, Roberto Barbera, Patrizia Belluomo, Ernesto Cangiano, Enrico Commis, Aurelio La Corte, Lucia Lo Bello, Armando Palmeri, Carlo Rocca, Vladimiro Sassone, Orazio Tomarchio, Santo Vanadia, Lorenzo Vita, Salvatore Cavalieri, Salvatore Monforte, Orazio Mirabella, Salvatore Costa, Alessia Tricomi.

CNAF: Federico Ruggieri, Antonia Ghiselli, Cristina Vistoli, Luca Dell’Agnello, Roberto Cucchi, Giulia Vita Finzi, Luigi Fonti, Andrea Chierici, Tiziana Ferrari, Pietro Matteuzzi

FIRENZE: Raffaello D’Alessandro, Marco Pieri, Leonardo Bellucci, Michela Lenzi, Leonardo Fabbroni, Piero Dominici (Urbino)

GENOVA: Alessandro Brunengo, Mauro Dameri, Bianca Osculati, Carlo Maria Becchi.

L. N. FRASCATI: Halina Bilokon, Vitaliano Chiarella, Elisabetta Pace, Agnese Martini.

L. N. LEGNARO: Gaetano Maron, Luciano Berti, Massimo Biasotto, Michele Gulmini, Nicola Toniolo, Luigi Vannucci.

LECCE: Giovanni Aloisio, Massimo Cafaro, Enrico M.V. Fasanelli, Edoardo Gorini, Cataldi Gabriella, Martello Daniele, Surdo Antonio, Franco Tommasi, Salvatore Campeggio, Lucio Depaolis.

MILANO: Laura Perini, Francesco Prelz, Giuseppe Lo Biondo, Silvia Resconi, G. Battistoni

PADOVA: Mirco Mazzucato, Michele Michelotto, Massimo Sgaravatto, Marco Bellato, Sandro Ventura, Ivano Lippi, Ugo Gasparini, Paolo Ronchese, Maurizio Morando.

PARMA: Enrico Onofri

PAVIA: Claudio Conta, Giacomo Polesello, Adele Rimoldi, Valerio Vercesi

PERUGIA: Leonello Servoli, Paolo Lariccia, Maurizio Biasini, Michele Punturo, Ciro Cattuto

PISA: Davide Costanzo, Giuseppe Bagliesi, Andrea Sciaba’, Alessandro Giassi, Vitaliano Ciulli, Zhen Xie, Flavia Donno, Silvia Arezzini, Fabrizio Palla, Raffaele Tripiccione, Staefano Cortese (Cascina)

ROMA: Luciano Maria Barone, Giovanni Organtini, Lamberto Luminari, Enzo Valente, Alessandro De Salvo, Speranza Falciano, Francesco Marzano, Alessandro Nisati, Riccardo Paramatti, Davide Rossetti, Federico Rapuano, Nicola Cabibbo, Fulvio Ricci, Cristiano Palomba, Sergio Frasca.

ROMA II: Paolo Camarri, Anna Di Ciaccio.

ROMA III: Ada Farilla, Cristian Stanescu.

SALERNO: M. Guida, T. Virgili, A. Seganti, D. Vicinanza, G. Grella, C, D’ Apolito

TORINO: Luciano Gaido, Mauro Gallio, Massimo Masera, Luciano Ramello, Enrico Scomparin, Ada Solano, M. Sitta, Werrborouck.

High Energy Physics Experiments have always requested state of the art computing facilities to efficiently perform the analysis of large data samples. The previous generation of experiments for the electron positron collider, LEP, has proven the effectiveness of the computing farms based on commodity components in providing low cost solutions to the LEP experiments needs and farms of this type are now very popular and distributed in most INFN sites.

The objectives of the INFN GRID project are to develop and deploy for INFN a prototype computational and data GRID capable to efficiently manage and provide effective usage of the large commodity components-based clusters and supercomputers distributed in the INFN nodes of the Italian research network Garr-b.

These geographically distributed resources, so far normally used by a single site, will be integrated using the GRID technology to form a coherent high throughput computing facility transparently accessible to all INFN users.

The INFN national GRID will be integrated with European and worldwide similar infrastructures being established by ongoing parallel activities in all major European countries, in US and Japan.

The scale of the computational, storage and networking capacity of the prototype INFN GRID will be determined by the needs of the LHC experiments. These include the experimental activities for physics, trigger and detector studies and the run of applications at a sufficient scale to test the scalability of the possible computing solutions to very large amount of distributed data (Pbytes), very large amount of CPU’s (thousands) and very large number of users.

The development of the new components of GRID technology will be done by the INFN GRID project, whenever possible, in collaboration with international partners through specific European or international projects. A proposal for the European Union IST program EU-RN2 is currently being submitted, asking for 10 M. EURO funding.

The MONARC Phase-3 project current activities are another important component of the INFN GRID project, as they will provide guidance for the developments of the computing models of the LHC experiments. The INFN GRID will investigate the current ideas for the computing models, based on the MONARC proposed hierarchical architecture of Tier1-TierN Regional Centers. The investigation will be performed using real applications on real Center prototypes, fulfilling at the same time the real computing needs of the experiments.

The project will encourage the diffusion of the GRID technologies in other Italian scientific research sectors (ESA/ESRIN, CNR, Universities), addressing the following points:

• develop collaborations with those italian Italian scientific partners to address problems which are common to the research sectors
• promote the integration ot of the research computing resources into one national research GRID

The INFN-GRID Project is the framework for efficiently connecting:

The current EU-GRID proposal that will be submitted by May the 10th is only requiring EU funds for the middleware development. The "testbed" and "HEP application" aspects are taken care of in two separate Workpackages .These workpackages that however require no EU funds for hardware and are just intended to provide for the work human resources needed for the integration within the collaboration-wide aspects of these activities. Further EU-GRID proposals are currently being considered for supporting the full GRID integration of the HEP applications and the full deployment of the GRID distributed LHC computing system. The INFN GRID will be the natural framework for the Italian participation to any such project, and will provide for the h/w needed and for the extra manpower required for the setting up and running of the local prototypes and physics applications.

The INFN-GRID project will be planned in order to fully integrate services and tools developed in EU-GRID in order to meet the requirements of INFN Experiments and to harmonize its activities with them. In addition to that INFN-GRID will develop specific workplans concerning:

• Validating and adapting GRID basic services (like the ones provided by GLOBUS) on top of which specific application oriented services (middleware) will be developed.
• Addressing INFN computing needs, not included in EU-GRID, some of them synchronized with experiment computing schedule. This will bring to develop intermediate releases of grid services optimizing the specific application computing.
• National testbed deployment characterized by the INFN collaborations requirements mostly in terms of computing, data and network capacity, and computing model. The national testbed will interconnect the other national testbeds through the European grid providing altogether the necessary size (data, computing, network and users) to test and validate middleware, application prototyping and the development of LHC experiment computing models

Testbed activities will include the workload management for individual analysis tasks, the data management in the distributed Italian scenario, the monitoring of the INFN resources, the standardization of INFN Farms distributed in different INFN sites and mass storage tests suited for the INFN site distributed activities. The network layout is foreseen to be provided by GARR in collaboration with the present project.

The INFN_GRID project will is going to provide the middleware and the testbeds for running the physics applications of the large big experiments which foresee the distributed analysis of very vast huge amounts of data: not only LHC experiments, but also VIRGO and APE fall in this category and are fully participating to the project. Of course all the INFN experiments that are in the conditions of taking benefit of this INFN GRID project are welcome and will be encouraged in joining for the specific activities of their interest: ARGO and COMPASS have already expressed their interest.

Example of activities where large synergies are possible include:

• Study of solutions for Information Service systems. A Directory Service based on LDAP protocol is currently investigated by a CC project to provide fast access to information concerning INFN people, mail addresses, etc. and by GLOBUS to make publicly available the static and dynamic status of GRID node resources.
• CONDOR as a tool for distributed simulations. CONDOR is already used in INFN for supporting distributed simulation activities and it is also a component of GLOBUS
• Networking : this is a domain where the expertise of CC and CNAF can be effectively confronted and enhanced in the common activities with other European partners to plan, integrate, run and monitor the HEP applications in the GRID European testbed.
• Security : the traditional expertise of the CC group can be used to enable an INFN certification authority to issue certificates that can be recognized worldwide by the GRID community.
• Farms standardization : the ongoing debate and experimentation in INFN will profit of the international forum and expertise since this is one of the major developments foresee in the European project

The needs of the LHC experiments in the Computing field for years 2001-2003 will be almost fully satisfied in the framework of the INFN-GRID project. The successful development of the GRID tools will be verified step by step using the widest possible variety of physics applications of the experiments, which will be run in a production style, aiming both at producing the physics results the experiment want and at using as much as possible the available middleware. Thus in principle all the computing activities of the experiments will be connected to the GRID which will finally provide the infrastructure for the distributed running of all of them.

Only the developments of detector related s/w and of the algorithmic parts of the experiment s/w will stay separate from the GRID project. The development of CORE s/w will instead have many points of contact with the GRID developments.

Whence we propose all the computing h/w of the experiments except the one related to standard s/w development and to on-line on-site applications to be funded in the framework of the INFN_GRID project for the years 2001-2003. Some online activities will also be covered by INFN-GRID (typically remote monitoring).

The activities performed in the framework of the MONARC project for its Phase-3 are also naturally falling within INFN-GRID, given their character of common project of the LHC experiments aimed at the definition of the common aspects of their computing models. The MONARC simulation program could provide a valuable tool for complementing the prototypes in planning for the LHC GRID implementation.

The computing people of the LHC experiments involved in the INFN-GRID project are working at the GRID because since the GRID is the instrument they are using for implementing the computing application of their experiments. ; therefore Therefore their contribution the fraction of their time devoted to the INFN-GRID project is to be counted as fully contained within the fraction of their time devoted to their LHC experiment.

The Computing Model that LHC Experiments are developing is based on Monarc studies, as well as on their own evaluations. The key elements of the architecture are based on an hierarchy of computing resources and functionalities (Tier0, Tier1, Tier2, etc.), on an hierarchy of data samples (RAW, ESD, AOD, TAG, DPD) and on an hierarchy of applications (reconstruction, re-processing, selection, analysis) both for real and simulated data.

The hierarchy of applications requires a policy of authorization, authentication and restriction based again on a hierarchy of entities like the "Collaboration", the "Analysis Groups" and the "final users".

The LHC Experiments Computing Design requires a distribution of the applications and of the data among the distributed resources. In this respect the correlation with GRID initiatives is clearly very strong. Grid-like applications are such applications that are run over the wide area network, i.e. include Regional Centres (Tier-n) using several computing and data resources with network links over the wide area network where each of the single computing resources can itself be a network of computers.

Within this framework the Computing Project is seen as a detector component, whose The final goal of the "Computing" detector is to provide the efficient means for the analysis and potential physics discovery to all the LHC Physicists.

In the discussions, within the Computing Model Panel of the LHC Computing Review, all LHC Collaborations agreed that is mandatory to reach, by 2003, a prototyping scale of the order of 10% of the final size foreseen in operation by 2006. To reduce the prototype scale could be a serious risk for the system. The experience has clearly shown that scaling by an order of magnitude can raise unexpected problems with the system incapable to fulfil its requirements. This would represent a disaster for the LHC Physics program.

All Italian LHC groups have therefore as target a prototype size, for 2003, about 10% of the 2006 one. At the same time each group has an activity program, for the next three years, which will involve considerable resources for simulation, reconstruction, and analysis of the simulated data. The prototype will provide these resources.

The motivation for the testbed-planned capacities is therefore twofold:

• to perform a system test with real tasks in realistic size
• to give an appropriate and cost effective answer to LHC computing needs in the next three years

Moreover the simulation process, involving event generation, reconstruction and analysis will represent a very suitable environment to reproduce the system in its full operation activity.

The estimations currently being made in the ATLAS collaboration evaluate at ~1000 KSI95 the computing power needed outside the Tier0 in 2006. These estimations are of course affected by a large error, however they are the best ATLAS can provide at this time and are the ones which have been presented at the LHC Computing Review taking place in these days. The secondary storage needs of a Tier1 Regional Center are estimated ~200 TB in 2006.

The Milestones for ATLAS computing include:

• Mock Data Challenge 1 (MDC1) in the first half of year 2002, testing the full new software chain on the scale of at least ~10⁶ events, distributed as widely as possible and making use of as much GRID as possible. Different trigger condition will be simulated and a significant subset of the Physics TDR plots will be reproduced.
• MDC2 in the first half of year 2003 on the scale of ~10⁸ events, testing also the distributed analysis GRID procedures and involving all the Regional Center prototypes.

The activities of specific interest for the Italian ATLAS community from 2001 include:

• Trigger studies for the muon system: a capacity of ~1500 SI95 and ~ 2TB disk should be in place already at start 2001 for allowing results to be available at end 2001 for the trigger TDR.
• GEANT4 simulation of QCD jets for studying the background to b/t physics and to the t identification: 10⁶ events to be simulated in 1 year time starting in mid-2001 will require ~1500 SI95 and ~2TB disk.

The detailed ATLAS milestones 2001-2003 for physics and trigger studies have still to be agreed by the collaboration: the activities of italian groups in 2002-2003 will also depend from these agreements, the participation to MDC2 is however already decided.

The table below provides a first preliminary evaluation of the target capacity to be reached each year by the ATLAS Regional Center prototypes. The breakdown of the CPU acquisitions between the different years could be somewhat revised subject to the final setting of the ATLAS computing Milestones

Each column represents the integral achieved in that year.

The ATLAS baseline model for implementing the Tier1 Regional Center is based on manpower outsourcing from available Consorzi di Calcolo: a first evaluation of the cost of this outsourcing is ~600Ml for the 3 years. The additional cost of housing is estimated ~250Ml for the 3 years. These ~850 Ml are estimated assuming the Tier1 prototypes are implemented dividing the capacity between two different sites: a single site option would allow a saving roughly estimated in ~100Ml/year. The consumable costs (electrical power etc.) for keeping this computing capacity up and running for the full three years is estimated ~350Ml.

CMS has also adopted the twofold motivation of the testbed capacities:

• A Regional Centres prototype of about 10% of the final (2006) System by year 2003.
• A "real needs applications" approach via the High Level Trigger studies and Physical studies to be due by year 2003.

Milestones settled by CMS are related to both the above approaches:

• Mock data challenge: ~1% in 2000 (ORCA), ~5% in 2002, ~20% in 2004.
• HLT studies: 2000, 2001, and 2002.
• 2001: DAQ TDR
• 2001: Computing Interim MoU
• 2002: SW/Computing TDR
• 2003: Computing MoU
• 2003: Physics TDR (5% mock data challenge results)
• 2004: Stress test (20% mock data challenge)

Some of the global CMS Collaboration resources expected by year 2006 are as follow:

• Total CPU power of the order of 1.7x10⁶ SpecInt95.
• Total disk storage larger than 700 TBytes.

The 10% realization by year 2003 of Tier-1 and Tier-2 Centres are in the plans of current INFN-Grid project for CMS Italy. To reach this goal CMS has adopted a slowly growing approach that consists to procure and put in operation some 20% in year 2001, 30% in year 2002 and 50% in year 2003 of the resources necessary to build the 10% final system prototype.

On the other hand, Italian CMS collaboration is strongly involved in the simulation and analysis of the necessary data to define the High Level Trigger algorithms and the Physical studies.

CMS is already exploiting now (2000) the simulation and reconstruction software for the off-line analysis of the Trigger and Physical channels. For the nearest time goals the deep study and optimization of the Trigger algorithms is the driving effort.

The rejection factor that the CMS Trigger has to provide against the background reactions is as large as 10⁶-10⁷. The High level Trigger (level2 and 3) have to provide a rejection factor of the order of 10³ in the shortest time possible and with the larger possible efficiency without depressing the searched signal.

The process of simulation and study has a planned schedule that will improve the statistical accuracy during the next three years. The number of events to be simulated increase of an order of magnitude during the three year project program, but the requested resources only increase of a factor two per year, taking into account the better efficiency and the learn management of the resources themselves.

CMS Italy (INFN) is strongly (and in many fields with a leading role) involved in this process of simulation and study, contributing with al least the 20% of the effort (both with computing resources and physics analysis competences).

Both the approaches to the prototyping phase lead to the same amount of resources needed. This scenario has the benefit of going to the prototype of Regional Centres (Tier-1 and Tier-2's) using the resources for "REAL" activities and physical results.

A preliminary deliverable plan for the two approaches can be summarized as follow:

A preliminary table with the most demanding resources required building the Grid-like testbed prototypes follows:

Each column represents the integral achieved in that year.

It should be stressed that Personnel and consumables needs are not included in the previous table, as well as the local support and LAN requirements. The LAN hardware costs are estimated 350 ML.

The current baseline LHCb computing model is based on a distributed multi-tier regional centre model following that described by MONARC. We assume in this scenario that regional centres (Tier 1) have significant cpu resources and a capability to archive and serve large data sets for all production activities, both for analysis of real data and for production and analysis of simulated data. At present we also assume that the production centre will be responsible for all production processing phases i.e. for generation of data, and for the reconstruction and production analysis of these data.

The Italian regional center requirements for supporting user analysis and simulation have been estimated to be of the order of 110KSI95 CPUs and 400 TB of disks. The plan is to reach the order of 10% of the final capacity by 2003, therefore to have 10KSI95 and 10 TB of disks. These resources will allow to perform the prototype tests on a significative size, continue on-going detector and low level trigger optimization, and begin signal and background Monte Carlo event simulations for physical studies.

The table below reports the estimated data volumes and CPU requirements to generate, store and reconstruct a data sample of 10⁶ events in one year.

The scientific goal of the Virgo project is the detection of gravitational wave in a frequency bandwidth from few Hertz up to 10 kHz. Virgo is an observatory that have has to operate and take data continuously in time. The data production rate of the instrument is ~ 4 Mbyte/s including the control signals of the interferometers, the data from the environmental monitor system and the main interferometer signals. Raw data will be available for off-line processing from the Cascina archive and from a mirror archive in the computer center of the IN2P3 of Lyon (France). The reconstructed data h(t), plus a reduced data set of the monitoring system, define the so called reduced data set. The production rate of the reduced data is expected of the order of 200 kbyte/s.

1. the search of the binary coalescent signals
2. the search of the continuous gravitational wave signals

We propose to approach these problems in the framework of the Grid project.

The search for the inspiraling binary g.w. signal is based on the well established technique of the matched filter.

The computing load is distributed over different processors dealing with different families of template. Then, the output is collected in order to perform the statistical tests and extract the candidates.

The computational cost and the storage requirements are non linear functions of the coordinates of the parameter space so that the optimization of the sharing of the computation resources and the efficiency of the job fragmentation will be the crucial point of the test.

The case of pulsar signal search is more demanding for computational resources. The procedure of the signal search is performed by analyzing the data stored in a relational data base of short FFTs derived from the h(t) quantity. The search method is basically hierarchical so that the definition and control of the job granularity is characterized by a higher level of complexity.

The goal of the Grid test bed is to optimize the full analysis procedure on the data generated by the Virgo central interferometer. We plan to limit the search to the frequency interval 10 Hz - 1.25 kHz and the computation will cover 2 month of data taking.

1. Computational resources and links.

Let us now list the needs for the total computational power and storage to be hierarchically distributed in the Virgo INFN sections and laboratories of the collaboration and structured in the classes of computer centers

Concerning the network links we notice that

1. the laboratory in Cascina has to become a node of the network backbone
2. we need dedicated bandwidths for the transmission of the reduced data set to the Tiers and to perform intensive distributed analysis
3. the international link should permit the reception and transmission of the reduced set of data to Europe, USA and Japan, and, at least in the future, the transfer of a relevant fraction of the raw data in France.

In conclusion, for test beds dedicated links connecting Virgo-Cascina, Roma1, Napoli, Perugia and Firenze must be foreseen.

Finally, we report in the Table the total capacity needed for the Virgo test beds at the end of 2001 and the final target for the off line analysis of Virgo.

For the organizational and managerial aspects of the project the general idea is to have

something similar to the well consolidated managerial organization of the HEP experiments.

The following organization can be proposed.

• A Collaboration Board, chaired by the Collaboration Board Chairman. This is , formed by :
• one representative for Experiment for each site and laboratory involved in the project
• .the One of the experiments site representatives that will be nominatedelected by the collaborating personnel of a site (and only one per site) ), in agreement with the site Director, to have also administrative responsibilities for that site, if not an. experiment site representative.
• ex-Officio members of this board are also all the members of the Executive Board (see next) and the Director of CNAF and the member of the Technical Board (see next).

• An Executive Board, chaired by the Project Manager, and composed by:
• The representatives or Computing Coordinators of the biggest experiments
• The Technical Coordinator of the project (see later).
• The INFN representative in the EU project DATAGRID

• A Technical Board, chaired by the Technical Coordinator, and composed by the Work Packages Coordinators and by the responsible of the experiment applications that are making day by day use of the GRID. We are here supposing that most of the those people will also be involved in the European GRID Project; if this is not the case, room should be left for another couple of persons technically involved in the EU initiative. This Board meets whenever necessary with a minimum of a meeting every 2 months to steer and monitor the technical progress of the Project, and solve the technical issues eventually raised in running the experiment application on the available GRID services.
• Collaboration Meetings are the general assemblies of the Project where, to all the members of the collaboration, is presented for discussion:
• the status of all the activities;
• the strategic decisions which have to be taken, proposed by the Executive to be subsequently approved by the Collaboration Board;
• new proposals and modifications of the existing work plans and/or organization.

We now describe the role and duties of the Key Persons.

• Collaboration Board Chairman: is the person who chairs the Collaboration Board and the Collaboration Meetings which are the general assemblies of the Project.
• Project Manager: is the person who has the general responsibility of the project, with particular emphasis on the Political and Administrative issues. He/she chairs the Executive Board and speaks on behalf of the entire collaboration. He presents, al least once per year, the Project Status Reports to the Collaboration Meetings and to the Collaboration Board.
• Technical Coordinator: is the person who coordinates all the technical activities in the Project. He/she chairs the Technical Board and presents, at least once per year, a Technical Status Report to the Executive and Collaboration Board. He is a member of the Executive Board.
• Work Package Coordinator: is a person who coordinates the activity of a single work package, he/she is an Ex Officio Member of the Technical Board where he is presenting regular status reports.
• Experiment Site Representative: is the representative of represents the group of persons of each experiment working in a site or a Laboratory, normally chosen by them. He/she is a member of the Collaboration Board. Each site will also choose one and only one person to have administrative responsibilities for that site.