While scientists wait for the terabytes of collision data that will be transmitted to labs around the world from the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN in Switzerland, a dedicated team of Ontario researchers are making preparations to receive and analyze what they expect could be a deluge of up to 100 terabytes of data each month.

The data will be transmitted over ultra-fast optical research networks, including Ontario's own ORION state-of-the-art network.

The highly anticipated $8-billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located underground at the France-Switzerland border near Geneva, is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator as well as the most complex science experiment ever developed.

Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, developed 30 years ago, which still provides the theoretical picture for particle physics.

For some researchers on award-winning physicist Prof. Robert S. Orr's team, this project could well represent their life's work. Some have already been associated with the project for nearly 15 years, and they expect to be involved in working with and analysing the data for quite possibly another 15 years.

For Prof. Orr, a mountain climber who admits interest in fuzzy animals, Jeep Wagoneers and Japanese culture, the LHC coming on line represents a personal and professional milestone, having been involved at the cutting edge of particle physics for nearly 30 years.

The Toronto team, which already consists of four primary researchers, 15 post-graduate researchers and one computer specialist, includes some of the country's most senior researchers, including Professors David Bailey, Peter Krieger, Pierre Savard, Richard Teuscher, William Trischuk, and Pekka Sinervo.

U of T's role is focused on a sophisticated experiment known as ATLAS (A Toroidal Lhc ApparatuS). The 7,000-tonne assembly, parts of which were built at U of T, tracks and measures the energy of particles emerging from the proton collisions in the LHC: particles that could be fragments of the elusive Higgs Boson.

"There's an awful lot of work to do," says ORION Award winner, Professor Orr, who is leading a U of T team anticipating a deluge of data that will soon descend upon those involved in the ATLAS project.

It is anticipated that up to 100 terabytes of data will be flowing to the Toronto lab when the LHC's "collision data" starts to be shared with Tier One and Two sites around the world.

While some experiment data was transmitted to participating researchers recently, Canadian researchers involved in the ATLAS project are awaiting the experiment's raw "collision" data to stream out to Tier One and Two sites around the world when magnets recently damaged in the Collider are replaced over the next several months.

Even data summaries can be 100TB in size and more. When the LHC is at full speed, up to three petabytes of data can be anticipated to be transmitted among the various world sites.

The infrastructure that makes the entire collaboration possible are the high-capacity optical networks, or "lightpaths" linking the primary site at CERN to various Tier 1 and Tier 2 sites around the world, including TRIUMF, Canada's ATLAS facility on the west coast, and to the Toronto team over advanced network connections via CANARIE and ORION.

Professor Orr and his team expect that the volume of raw data that will need to be received and processed will be significantly greater than first anticipated.

"Having access to ORION and CANARIE is critical. We simply would not be able to participate in this project without these networks," says the celebrated researcher.

The team is also anticipating the completion of the U of T's new SciNet high-performance computing facility and its link-up to the ORION and global research grid. SciNet's massive computational capabilities are critical to analyzing the flood of data.

For physicists involved in this experiment, having access to world-scale advanced networks are a god-send. "In the past, we had to store data on magnetic tapes and send them by air freight," says Prof. Orr.

Now, he says, the process involves submitting "jobs" over the grid of distributed high performance computers "and connectivity is critical for that."

One of the elements Prof. Orr likes to emphasize is the distributed nature of the project in Canada, and the collaboration of the ATLAS project teams, the TRIUMF facilities in British Columbia, and the role of the University of Toronto and several other Canadian universities, all interconnected over the CANARIE, ORION and other regional networks.

As ORION award winner, Prof. Orr says he very proud of the award, and of the acknowledgement from Premier Dalton McGuinty, when he was honoured at the ORION Award ceremony in 2006, winning the ORION Discovery Award of Merit.

Visit the ATLAS Canada web site at www.atlas-canada.ca.

Learn more about the important of advanced networking and how it is supporting the collaborative nature of the research of the LHC's data at the Internet2 wiki page, where a an informative video is available for viewing: www.internet2.edu/lhc/.