Towards the future: tackling upcoming data challenges

A continuing programme of upgrades and consolidations to the LHC and the experiments at CERN will result in hugely increased ICT demands in the coming years, exceeding what is expected to be achievable with a constant investment budget by several factors in both storage and computing capacity. The High-Luminosity LHC, the successor to the LHC, is planned to come online after 2025. By this time, the total computing capacity required by the experiments is expected to be 50-100 times greater than today, with data storage needs expected to be in the order of exabytes.

In order to address this, in 2017 the High Energy Physics community produced a roadmap Community White Paper (arXiv:1712.06982) that explores these software challenges and describes a number of potential mechanisms by which the community can address these problems of capacity and efficiency that will be faced during the next decade.

The large-scale data challenges of HL-LHC are also shared with other science communities. WLCG and CERN have been working with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio astronomy community to explore some of these common challenges. In June 2017, CERN and the SKA Organisation signed a Collaboration Agreement for joint work in computing and data management.

In 2017 CERN openlab also published a white paper identifying the major ICT challenges that face CERN and other ‘big science’ projects in the coming years in order to collaborate with the industry and research institutes to tackle them.