Towards a Model for Computing in European Astroparticle Physics

TL;DR

This paper surveys current and future computing needs for astroparticle physics experiments, highlighting the significant growth in data and resource requirements, and discusses the distribution of computing tasks across major centers.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive assessment of the current and projected computing resource needs in astroparticle physics and analyzes data handling diversity across key research centers.

Findings

Current CPU and storage resources are about one third of CERN's Tier-0 capacity.

Computing requirements are expected to increase tenfold by the end of the decade.

Distribution of computing tasks among major centers is characterized for planning purposes.

Abstract

Current and future astroparticle physics experiments are operated or are being built to observe highly energetic particles, high energy electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves originating from all kinds of cosmic sources. The data volumes taken by the experiments are large and expected to grow significantly during the coming years. This is a result of advanced research possibilities and improved detector technology. To cope with the substantially increasing data volumes of astroparticle physics projects it is important to understand the future needs for computing resources in this field. Providing these resources constitutes a larger fraction of the overall running costs of future infrastructures. This document presents the results of a survey made by APPEC with the help of computing experts of major projects and future initiatives in astroparticle physics, representatives of current Tier-1 and Tier-2 LHC computing centers, as well as specifically astroparticle physics computing centers, e.g. the Albert Einstein Institute for gravitational waves analysis in Hanover. In summary, the overall CPU usage and short-term disk and long-term (tape) storage space currently available for astroparticle physics projects' computing services is of the order of one third of the central computing available for LHC data at the Tier-0 center at CERN. Till the end of the decade the requirements for computing resources are estimated to increase by a factor of 10. Furthermore, this document shall describe the diversity of astroparticle physics data handling and serve as a basis to estimate a distribution of computing and storage tasks among the major computing centers. (Abridged)