Rod Walker

Simon Fraser University

CV Highlights

• Research Associate, High Energy Physics (HEP) group

• BSc Physics, Manchester University (1993); PhD High Energy Particle Theory, Manchester University (1997)

• Developed CondorG infrastructure to form GridX1

• Coordination of ATLAS production system group

• Research Interests: Distributed data intensive processing.

At The Energy Frontier

WestGrid resources have helped place our country at the forefront of High Energy Physics (HEP) research. Canada currently holds a spot as a major contributor to the international ATLAS collaboration, which explores the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape the universe around us. Using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility in Switzerland, ATLAS researchers, amongst other things, hope to discover the elusive Higgs particle and study its properties. Distributed processing is the only way to harness sufficient resources to analyze the LHC data. WestGrid's grid-enabled resources have enabled the local HEP community to play a leading role in the studies required to analyze the real data.

At SFU, Rod Walker is responsible for the development and testing of the distributed systems that produce ATLAS-related data on Grids around the world. Walker also played a key role in interfacing WestGrid's computing cluster at UBC with the LHC Grid (LCG), improving Canadian researchers' data analysis productions. This also expanded local users' reach, giving them access to Canadian resources as well as LCG resources world-wide.