"The Grid" is the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, the British man who invented the World Wide Web, wrote "www" on a blackboard in 1989.
A network of 80,000 computers is being geared up to see a deluge of data when Europe's Large Hardron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle collider, is switched on on Wednesday.
'The Grid' will see 80,000 computer network processing data from LHC
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
07/09/2008
The Telegraph
A network of around 80,000 computers worldwide is being readied for a deluge of data when the Large Hadron Collider starts up, marking a new phase in the use of the web.
The machine will slam subatomic particles called protons together to recreate conditions not seen since an eyeblink after the Big Bang of creation and explore new realms of nature, including finding the Higgs particle that plays a starring role in current theory, holding it together, and helping to endow matter with mass.
Europe's Large Hadron Collider superconducting magnet: The Grid allows computer users to tap computer power anywhere on the planet
Around 300 computer centres in 50 countries will handle data from the vast atom smasher for the next decade, marking what will be the biggest computing exercise in history.
Handing the deluge of data will mark a test for the next generation of computing, called The Grid or "the cloud", and the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the internet, wrote "www" on a blackboard in 1989 on the site of the huge machine.
The backbone of the grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of PCs linked together. The biggest concentration is the 80,000 PCs in a "farm" at the Large Hadron Collider, part of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN, near Geneva.
When the experiments get running at the LHC, the four great "eyes" of the machine start observing collisions, they will generate 15 million gigabytes of data every year, that is equivalent to one thousand times the information printed in the form of books annually.
"If you put them on CDs and stacked them up, that stack would be more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) tall." said Dr Bob Jones, Director of the EGEE, Enabling grids for e-science project, which is co-funded by the European Commission.
Or, in terms of iPod data, the annual output of the atom smasher is equivalent to a song running for 24,000 years.
The data will be used by around 10,000 researchers around the world.
The Grid allows computer users to tap computer power anywhere on the planet.
Like the electrical grid - which gives the system its name - the computing power is available on demand. And, he said, new machines are being added all the time.
Using the grid, the power of your machine - all those gigabytes, RAM and gigahertz - will become irrelevant. No matter how primitive and cheap the computer, you will have access to more power than currently exists in the Pentagon and this kind of distributed computing is already becoming available, for example in the form of Google Apps.
Jones said that vast power of the Grid is being used for many other intensive number crunching exercises, from planning brain surgery to designing fusion reactors to processing mammograms to reading genetic codes to editing digital movies.
"The use of the Grid by other scientific groups has grown 1,200 per cent over the last two years," said Dr Jones.
Because data and software have to be exchanged between hundreds of thousands of computers, the Grid depends on "open access" software, rather than that developed by any one company, to make sure that any computer can take data from a source in, say, Singapore, process it on software in California and store it on a hard drive in India.
Dr Jones said that this is in the same spirit that Berners-Lee developed the world wide web.
telegraph.co.uk
A network of 80,000 computers is being geared up to see a deluge of data when Europe's Large Hardron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle collider, is switched on on Wednesday.
'The Grid' will see 80,000 computer network processing data from LHC
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
07/09/2008
The Telegraph
A network of around 80,000 computers worldwide is being readied for a deluge of data when the Large Hadron Collider starts up, marking a new phase in the use of the web.
The machine will slam subatomic particles called protons together to recreate conditions not seen since an eyeblink after the Big Bang of creation and explore new realms of nature, including finding the Higgs particle that plays a starring role in current theory, holding it together, and helping to endow matter with mass.
Europe's Large Hadron Collider superconducting magnet: The Grid allows computer users to tap computer power anywhere on the planet
Around 300 computer centres in 50 countries will handle data from the vast atom smasher for the next decade, marking what will be the biggest computing exercise in history.
Handing the deluge of data will mark a test for the next generation of computing, called The Grid or "the cloud", and the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the internet, wrote "www" on a blackboard in 1989 on the site of the huge machine.
The backbone of the grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of PCs linked together. The biggest concentration is the 80,000 PCs in a "farm" at the Large Hadron Collider, part of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym CERN, near Geneva.
When the experiments get running at the LHC, the four great "eyes" of the machine start observing collisions, they will generate 15 million gigabytes of data every year, that is equivalent to one thousand times the information printed in the form of books annually.
"If you put them on CDs and stacked them up, that stack would be more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) tall." said Dr Bob Jones, Director of the EGEE, Enabling grids for e-science project, which is co-funded by the European Commission.
Or, in terms of iPod data, the annual output of the atom smasher is equivalent to a song running for 24,000 years.
The data will be used by around 10,000 researchers around the world.
The Grid allows computer users to tap computer power anywhere on the planet.
Like the electrical grid - which gives the system its name - the computing power is available on demand. And, he said, new machines are being added all the time.
Using the grid, the power of your machine - all those gigabytes, RAM and gigahertz - will become irrelevant. No matter how primitive and cheap the computer, you will have access to more power than currently exists in the Pentagon and this kind of distributed computing is already becoming available, for example in the form of Google Apps.
Jones said that vast power of the Grid is being used for many other intensive number crunching exercises, from planning brain surgery to designing fusion reactors to processing mammograms to reading genetic codes to editing digital movies.
"The use of the Grid by other scientific groups has grown 1,200 per cent over the last two years," said Dr Jones.
Because data and software have to be exchanged between hundreds of thousands of computers, the Grid depends on "open access" software, rather than that developed by any one company, to make sure that any computer can take data from a source in, say, Singapore, process it on software in California and store it on a hard drive in India.
Dr Jones said that this is in the same spirit that Berners-Lee developed the world wide web.
telegraph.co.uk
