Science Grid Genesis

Cranial Dome writes "According to this Cnet.com story, the Department of Energy (DOE) is working to interconnect the first two computers which will form the genesis of the DOE Science Grid, a virtual supercomputing system which will eventually encompass many more systems at several locations. The larger of the two machines: DOE National Energy Research Science Center's (NERSC) IBM SP RS/6000, a distributed memory machine with 2,944 compute processors. This machine, together with a smaller 160 processor Intel system, will make up a combined 3,328 processor Unix system with 1.3 petabytes(!) of storage space. And this is only the beginning..."

Comments

Hmmm, This and the PS3

[gwizah]

Well it seems as though we may now know what Sony Engineers mean by "Distributed Computing"

Seriously though, What type of security system is the DOE building into this, which is essentially a large mainframe? Its understandable to be worried when the DOE handles things such as nuclear secrets that sometimes slip into the hands of certain researchers, much like they were picking them up at a drive-through.

Im curious to see how the data will be encrypted/decrypted along such a vast system.

petabytes

[PsiPsiStar]

Well, I just think it's great we're talking in petabytes now. Hope we don't get too many coments about petafiles *sigh*. Of course, being the neder-geek that I am (that's the opposite of ubergeek, right?) I had to look it up. For the similarly clueless(call me a karma whore);

petabyte - 2 to the 50th power (1,125,899,906,842,624) bytes. A petabyte is equal to 1,024 terabytes. (i.e. 2 to the 20th power gigabytes)

terabyte - 2 to the 40th power (1,099,511,627,776) bytes. This is approximately 1 trillion bytes or 1,048,576 gigabytes.

Gigabyte - 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes.

1/9671406556917033397649408 yottabyte = 1/9444732965739290427392 zettabyte = 1/9223372036854775808 exabyte = 1/9007199254740992 petabyte = 1/8796093022208 terabyte = 1/8589934592 gigabyte = 1/8388608 megabyte = 1/1048576 Megabit = 1/8192 kilobyte = 1/1024 Kilobit = 1/8 byte = 1/4 nibble bit = 1 bit