Using Gordon to accelerate LHC science

The discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has garnered international attention. In addition to this singular result, the LHC may also uncover other fundamental particles, including dark matter. Much of this research is being done on data from one of the LHC experiments, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS). The CMS experiment was able to capture data at higher sampling frequencies than planned during the 2012 LHC operational period. The resulting data had been parked, waiting to be processed on CMS computers. While CMS has significant compute resources, by partnering with SDSC to incorporate Gordon into the CMS workflow, analysis of the parked data was completed months ahead of schedule. This allows scientists to review the results more quickly, and could guide future plans for the LHC.