World's Largest Computing Grid Surpasses 100 Sites

KingFishKingFish
edited March 2005 in Science & Tech
British physicists and computer scientists are playing a key role in facing one of the biggest computing problems in the world - how to process the massive data volumes expected from the world's biggest particle physics experiment the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at CERN in Switzerland.
To manage this, researchers have been creating a Grid to distribute the processing and storage of data around the world. Yesterday, March 15th 2005, the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project announced that its massive computing Grid now includes more than 100 sites in 31 countries. This makes it the world's largest international scientific Grid. The UK is the biggest single contributor to the LCG, with more than a fifth of the Grid's processing power at its 16 sites.

The name 'Grid' comes from analogy with the Electricity Grid. Users can obtain a resource such as electricity, or in this case, computer processing, from a variety of sources to supply their needs, without needing to know where it comes from. This means that a scientist can be based anywhere in the world and request calculations on data from CERN, that will then be performed across numerous sites, countries and even continents. The sites participating in the LCG project are primarily universities and research laboratories. They contribute more than 10,000 central processor units (CPUs) and a total of nearly 10 million Gigabytes of storage capacity on disk and tape. More than 2,000 of these CPUs are in the UK, along with one million Gigabytes of storage capacity. LCG receives substantial support from the EU-funded project Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE), which is a major contributor to the operations of the LCG project.
Source: Science Daily

Comments

  • QCHQCH Ancient Guru Chicago Area - USA Icrontian
    edited March 2005
    Fermilab (where I work) is doing tons of work for the LHC. I believe we're making some of the magnets and detectors. Right now, Fermilab is the World's most powerful Particle Accelerator until the LHC goes live in 2007. Fermilab also has quite a bit of PC power to the GRID.
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