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."

Comments

Distributed networking

[CrazyJim0]

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.

after Deep Blue comes Deep Thought

[ElJosho]

Finally, IBM is building a computer powerful enought to answer the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The ultimate question

[manseman]

some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the Universe.

I'll save them the effort.

42.

Re:The ultimate question

[cperciva]

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.)

One of the coolest places

[Anonymous Coward]

CERN is definitely one of the coolest places on Earth. For a bid a couple of years ago, I had to do some reasearch regarding their storage requirements and data management facilities. These people produce 10 *Peta*bytes* of data per year. For us mortals to understand that number, it's got to be converted to gigabytes per second: 300+ GB/s. On the basement we've got a 2 TB RAID. The people at CERN fill that baby in less than 7 seconds. No, scratch that. Our RAID (dual fibrechannel 10000 rpm SCSI discs) tops at 120 MB/s. See what I mean? Just try to grasp the kind of SAN these people have in order to move 300 GB/s arround.

Filling application right away.

Re:One of the coolest places

[Anonymous Coward]

here. Seems they move 300 Gb/s not 300 GB/s arround. Still impressive.

Re:One of the coolest places

[cperciva]

10 PB/year = 10^16 B/year = 2.74x10^13 B/day = 1.14x10^12 B/hour = 317 MB/s.

You're off by a factor of 1000.

Specifically. . .

[Fritz Benwalla]

This system stores, crunches, and distributes data generated by the Large Hadron Collider. They generate a million gig a year in data, and need to make it available in some functional way to physicists. Manditory groovy collider pic here.

A major collaborator on this stuff is Globus which provides an API for grid applications. Same people who are partners with IBM in the butterfly.net game grid.

Maybe MTU can use it to store their students' Kazaa archives.

------

Here are some links..

[abhisarda]

More about IBM and Cern- Gridcomputingplanet

Cern and Java- Vnunet

More about Cern-Hepwww
The Large Electron Positron Collider at Cern-Hepwww

Re:Grids suck

[Anonymous Coward]

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.