ATLAS Computing: Dealing with Petabytes of Data per Year

ATLAS is a particle physics experiment at CERN in Geneva, which will study proton- proton collisions at the highest energy ever achieved in the laboratory. The main goal of the experiment is to discover the Higgs particle, which is central to the current theory of how subatomic particles attain mass. ATLAS will also search for a variety of phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. In order to carry out this research program, ATLAS will collect data from millions of collisions per second, recording 200 Hz to tape. This will result in 3.5 PetaBytes (1015 bytes) of data per year, which could double when secondary data sets are produced. This talk will describe the international computing network (WLCG) that has been set up using Grid tools to deal with this avalanche of data. Emphasis will be given to Canada´s contributions to WLCG.