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IBM & CERN openlab for DataGrid Applications
Jules V.D. writes "CERN and IBM today announced that IBM is joining the CERN openlab for DataGrid applications to collaborate in creating a massive data-management system built on Grid computing.IBM's innovative storage virtualization and file management technology, will play a pivotal role in this collaboration, which aims to create a data file system far larger than exists today to help scientists at CERN understand some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the Universe."
Excellent.
Much like the appeal of Seti at home was searching for AI... People now have a choice which distributed net they want to support.
Its a system, similar to voting, that will have every distributed net in the future trying to please.
I forsee distributed nets of the future attempting to produce results, in order to keep people interested and donating their computer cycles.
Its an interesting system, that works a bit like deomocracy.
God spoke to me
But a petabyte. Wow. 1.5 million CDs. That's just... Just... *shrug*
Think of it as being about a quarter of a Google.
(I don't know exactly how big Google is now, but they were at 1.5PB a couple years ago, so they're probably somewhere around 4PB now.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Grids are intended for cpu and data-storage sharing, which means that all institutions contributing in a grid can, according to the permissions set, use the systems in the grid. Not all scientists working on the data at Cern can aford to be there, to have all the data on local storate, always, and to convincingly get Cern's computing farms dedicated to their calculations.
Grids make more power and more storate awailable to more people.
What does suck about grids is complexity, lack of good software supporting grids and, perhaps, latency.