The CMS Computing System: Successes and Challenges

TL;DR

The paper discusses the CMS computing system's design, implementation, and testing to handle petabyte-scale data from LHC experiments, highlighting its readiness for initial physics results.

Contribution

It presents the architecture and recent testing results of CMS's large-scale computing system for high-energy physics data processing.

Findings

System successfully processed petabyte-scale data

Demonstrated readiness for initial LHC physics results

Validated scalability and performance of computing infrastructure

Abstract

Each LHC experiment will produce datasets with sizes of order one petabyte per year. All of this data must be stored, processed, transferred, simulated and analyzed, which requires a computing system of a larger scale than ever mounted for any particle physics experiment, and possibly for any enterprise in the world. I discuss how CMS has chosen to address these challenges, focusing on recent tests of the system that demonstrate the experiment's readiness for producing physics results with the first LHC data.