Table of contents

Successful operation of the LHC and its experiments is crucial to the future of the worldwide high-energy physics program. Remote operations and monitoring centres have been established for the CMS experiment in several locations around the world. The development of remote centres began with the LHC@FNAL ROC and has evolved into a unified approach with distributed centres that are collectively referred to as "CMS Centres Worldwide." An overview of the development of remote centres for CMS will be presented, along with a synopsis of collaborative tools that are used in these centres today and trends in the development of remote operations capabilities for high-energy physics.

Data Acquisition systems are an integral part of an LHC experiment. They are designed to meet the needs set by the physics programme. Despite some very interesting differences in the architecture, the unprecedented data-rates expected at the LHC have led to a lot of commonalities among the four large LHC data acquisition systems. All of them rely on commercial local area network technology and more specifically mostly on Gigabit Ethernet. They transport the data from the detector readout-boards to large farms of industry standard servers, where a pure software trigger is run. These four systems will be reviewed, the underlying commonalities will be high-lighted and interesting architectural differences will be discussed. In view of a possible LHC upgrade we will briefly discuss the suitability and evolution of the current architectures to fit the needs of SLHC.

The Belle II experiment which aims to increase the Luminosity of the KEKB collider by a factor of 50 will search for physics beyond the Standard Model through precision measurements and the investigation of rare processes in Flavour physics. The expected data rate is comparable to a current era LHC experiment with commensurate computing needs. Incorporating commercial cloud computing, such as that provided by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) into the Belle II computing model may provide a lower Total Cost of Ownership for the Belle II computing solution.

To investigate this possibility, we have created a system to conduct the complete Belle Monte Carlo simulation chain on EC2 to benchmark the cost and performance of the service. This paper will describe how this was achieved in addition to the drawbacks and costs of large-scale Monte Carlo production on EC2.