A Globally Distributed System for High Energy Physics Computation: Job, Data, and Information Handling for High-Energy Physics

The computing infrastructures of the modern high-energy physics experiments need to address an unprecedented set of requirements. The collaborations consist of hundreds of members from dozens of institutions around the world and the computing power necessary to analyze the data produced surpasses already the capabilities of any single computing center. A software infrastructure capable of seamlessly integrating dozens of computing centers around the world, enabling computing for a large and dynamical group of users, is of fundamental importance for the production of scientific results. Such a computing infrastructure is called a computational grid. The SAM-Grid offers a solution to these problems for CDF and DZero, two of the largest high-energy physics experiments in the world, running at Fermilab. The SAM-Grid integrates standard grid middleware, such as Condor-G and the Globus Toolkit, with software developed at Fermilab, organizing the system in three major components: data handling, job handling, and information management. This dissertation presents the challenges and the solutions provided in such a computing infrastructure.