The BaBar Experiment - Computing Issues for the year 2000

The BABAR experiment at the PEP-II asymmetric e+e- Collider at SLAC is due to commence data taking early in 1999. This talk will briefly describe the detector and its physics goals in order to set the scale of the computing problem. Approximately 109 events, corresponding to 80 TBytes of information, are expected to be accumulated per year. In addition the collaboration is large and geographically dispersed--almost 500 physicists from 80 institutions in 10 countries. Thus the computing issues break down into two categories--technical and sociological/managerial. Both of these will be discussed. The major focus will be on the work that is underway to establish a distributed software development environment, the computing model that is the baseline plan for dealing with the onslaught of data, and more speculative avenues that are expected to be explored in parallel with this baseline