This course will be centered on Grid and Cloud computing. Following on from the hypercomputing experiments of the 80's and 90's, the Grid paradigm was proposed at the end of the last century. At that time the enormous computing needs of LHC were known, and LHC computing experts were modeling a distributed computing infrastructure that could satisfy them. Starting from the vision proposed by the Grid paradigm, the LHC joined forces with other communities to develop the largest Grid in operation, totaling >200k Cores, 80PB of disk space distributed in over 150 centres worldwide. This Grid has been serving LHC needs since 10 years and it has been the main workhorse for the recent historical discovery of the Higgs Boson, completing the Standard Model of matter.

Topics will be:

• Grid and Cloud - history, evolution, future
• Software and tools for girds and clouds - from EGI to gLite to EMI to vitualization
• Catalogues, storages and federations - data stores and annotation, efficient data access accross long distances 4. International and national networks - the glue of the Grid
• Operation and monitoring - how is the Grid run
• LHC Physics and the Grid - the computing behind the discovery

The participants will be exposed to cutting-edge Grid and Coud computiational platforms and their real-life use in the service of the LHC, arguably the largest scientific instrument on the planet. The underlying computng technologies and the challenges of the LHC computing infrastructure will be described in detail. They will acquire in-depth knowledge of the Grid and Cloud development history, associated projects, the software building blocks, operations principles and goals.