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Virtual Grid Supercomputer Goes (Partly) Online

Posted by timothy on from the assembling-skynet dept.

hotsauce writes "The BBC is reporting that CERN (the guys who invented the Web) are working on a virtual supercomputer called the Grid. The Grid taps computing power from 12 countries to process data from a new supercollider that will simulate parts of the Big Bang. Phase One of the Grid just went online."

11 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Datagrid homepage by maharg · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://eu-datagrid.web.cern.ch/eu-datagrid/

    --

    $ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
    @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
    1. Re:Datagrid homepage by utexaspunk · · Score: 2, Informative

      Have you worked in a post-graduate computational research environment? I worked for a subgroup at TICAM (now ICES) at UT back when I was a student and most of the grad students, post-docs, researchers, etc. in the places where I've worked speak very little english and have no eye for presentation. Most of them WOULD use FrontPage, because they just want to slap something up there. They often also had a hard time doing even the most basic stuff in Powerpoint. I find most of the people that are real into theoretical computing/mathematics stuff don't give a rat's ass for spending time on presentation. Good for me, though, as that was my job to clean up their stuff :) So, maybe it says something about their project that they didn't have enough money (or weren't marketing savvy/vain enough) to hire their own graphic designer.

  2. Re:When will we do this ourselves? by Cochonou · · Score: 2, Informative

    Meanwhile, just use one of the plenty of distributed computing programs that already exist for scientific research, if ever you got bored by SETI@home...
    Analytical Spectroscopy Research Group
    evolution@home
    eOn
    Climate Prediction
    Distributed Particle Accelerator Design
    LifeMapper
    etc...

  3. Re:When will we do this ourselves? by sql*kitten · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sure, grids are cool, but when can we download a safe piece of software which to use for distributed calculations? When I'm not it need of doing stuff myself it would use my idle time for other people's calculations, and vice versa.

    You can get it here along with some case studies of how it's used in production.

    Distributed backups is another thing I'd like to have now, rather than tomorrow...

    Uuencode, split, and post to Usenet...

  4. Re:"The equivalent of" by ColaMan · · Score: 2, Informative

    Because your average layman wouldn't know a terabyte if you force fed it to him , bit-by-bit.
    For example - I bought an 80GB drive for a server the other day.....

    Secretary : "80GB? how big is that?"

    Me: "Well...... if you presume that there are:
    80 characters across a page by 66 lines down, you get approx 4000 characters per page of (dense) text.
    So, 80 thousand million divided by 4000 gives you 20 million pages of text."

    Secretary (mildly impressed): "That's a lot!"

    Now, she has no real idea how much volume of paper is involved in 20 million pages, so I continued :

    Me : "So, if you translate that into boxes of paper thats... 20000000 / 500 sheet reams / 10 reams to a box.. that gives 4000 boxes of paper, like that heavy box on the floor beside you. Imagine 4 cubes of 10x10x10 boxes, that's 20 million pages. (Casually waves drive about) All in this conveniently-sized package!"

    Secretary (dumbfounded): "Wow."

    Me : "Ain't technology great?"

    --

    You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
    There is a lot of hype here.
  5. ..as a user of GRID by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I can tell you it is not a waste of time, or some glorified PR exercise. The establishment I work at specialises in large-scale carbon growth modelling, and we have seen computational time for whole-Europe models fall from 48 hours on a dual P4 Xeon to a mere 5 minutes using MPI Fortan/C++ on a 64-node GRID machine.

  6. Re:Under-hyped by pubjames · · Score: 4, Informative

    Einstein, of course, was an American, and like many other Americans, he was born somewhere else, and got here as quickly as he could.

    Einstein was born in 1879 and moved to America in 1931 at the age of 52.

  7. Re:When will we do this ourselves? by Multics · · Score: 2, Informative
    We (the USA) have multiple times:

    The TeraGrid is the NSF flagship for grid computing - be it good or bad.

    The Grid.org people are some of the former SETI@home people gone more general purpose.

    And of course, there is The Global Grid Forum which is meeting in Chicago in a week or so. GGF is the standards behind the Globus enabled grid.

    We could ask why CERN/etal couldn't have come up with a slightly more imaginary name?

    We can also ask why NSF are such suckers for the last 20 years of hype from the people who have run the national supercomputer centers in the USA? Ditto congress. But that is a (sad) story for a different day.

    And finally we can ask what Top500.org is going to do when people begin reporting HPL benchmarks using these things? That HPL became the standard that people are designing supercomputers around argues just how totally screwed up high performance computing really is at the moment.

    -- Multics

  8. Re:Learn the language, dummy! by pubjames · · Score: 2, Informative

    You should learn (and strive to master) the language(s) of your host country or expect to be received as a retarded person or an animal would.

    Yes! I bet all those US troops in Iraq are currently making a big effort to learn Arabic and Kurdish...

  9. I used to work there... by mt-biker · · Score: 3, Informative

    I used to work in the computer centre at CERN, and they've been using distributed computing (read "clusters") for a long time (at least 10 years) now. By the time I left, there were already some 500 2 CPU Linux PCs in the computer centre, and a serious amount of thought was being given to building a mezzanine level within the computer centre to create more floor space for PCs. CERNs problem was always one of scale.

    Now it seems they want to buy floor space at other institutions around the world. :) I hope it all works out. What I'm wondering is what sort of network they have connecting the sites - the work load of these machines is very simple - but mostly IO bound. What sort of bandwidth do they need to make 15,000 TB available all over the world?

    More fun facts - at the time I left they had 5 STK Powderhorn silos, holding their current data. Prediction for LHC requirements (including better tape storage densities) was that they would need another 40 silos. If you've seen an STK Powderhorn, then you know just how ig the things are. So another building was to be built just for these silos. :)

    Oh, and as someone pointed out, the 15,000 TBs a year is just the data that gets kept - the live data from the detectors is preprocessed in the computer centre and "thinned out". The data rates coming into the computer centre are truly mind-boggling.

    1. Re:I used to work there... by Vision.nl · · Score: 2, Informative

      During integration of new security software i saw the building of a new place to store more computers. There are 1300 nodes @ the computer centre (as one cluster, not mentioned other smaller ones). New power cabeling... DataTAG is a collaborating project with EDG that is also working on Internet2 for HighSpeed and Long Distance Networking issues (optimizing, altering tcp-stack, Level-1 networking, other stuff). @DataTAG there was a route set from Amsterdam to California with a average of 933Mbit/s. 5.6Gbit/s is already set from Amsterdam to CERN. Very sweet progress for long distance issues.