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World's Largest Working Computing Grid
fenimor writes "UK particle physicists claim that they will demonstrate the world's largest, working computing Grid with over 6,000 computers at 78 sites internationally. The Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid is built to deal with 15 Petabytes of data each year from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently under construction at CERN in Geneva. 'This is a great achievement for particle physics and for e-Science,' says Professor Tony Doyle, leader of GridPP. 'Our next aim is to scale up the computing power available by a factor of ten'."
the optimization flags on one of those,....
Finally, something to run doom3 on. Though I may still have to turn shadows off...
But let's talk about something serious: how many FPS in Doom III?
...
Mmmmm... That might be worth the upgrade then...
finally something to deal with those pesky environmentalists.... :-P
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
"'Our next aim is to scale up the computing power available by a factor of ten'.
"
And soon after it will become sentient and take over the world. Welcome our new lord and master.
Does anybody know facts about the computing power of the grid? How many teraflops will it be able to achieve?
What's the point of the Grid thingy if they've also setup this?
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/
This week, UK particle physicists will demonstrate the world's largest, working computing Grid. With over 6,000 computers at 78 sites internationally, the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG) is the first permanent, worldwide Grid for doing real science. The UK is a major part of LCG, providing more than 1,000 computers in 12 sites. At the 2004 UK e-Science All Hands Meeting in Nottingham, particle physicists representing a collaboration of 20 UK institutions will explain to biologists, chemists and computer scientists how they reached this milestone.
Particle physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently under construction at CERN in Geneva will produce around 15 Petabytes of data each year - 15 million, billion bytes. To deal with this vast volume of data, particle physicists worldwide have been building a computing Grid. By 2007, this Grid will have the equivalent of 100,000 of today's fastest computers working together to produce a 'virtual supercomputer', which can be expanded and developed as needed. When the LHC experiments start in 2007, they are expected to reveal new physics processes that were crucial in building the Universe we see today, and shed light on mysteries such as the origin of mass.
Grid computing has been a target for IT developers and scientists for more than five years. It allows scientists to access computer power and data from around the world seamlessly, without needing to know where the computers are. Analysis for particle physics can also be done on conventional supercomputers, but these are expensive and in high demand. Grid computing, in contrast, is constructed from thousands of cheap units that can be increased to meet users' needs. Like the web before it, the Grid has the potential to impact on everyone's computing.
GridPP, the UK's particle physics Grid project, was set up by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council in 2000. On 1 September this year the project reaches its halfway point, with the official end of its first phase and the start of GridPP2. According to Dr Dave Britton, the GridPP project manager, "The first half of the project aimed to create a prototype Grid - which we've done very successfully. Having proved that a Grid can work, we're now focussed on developing a large-scale stable, easy-to-use Grid integrated with other international projects. This will let scientists tackle problems that are much larger than those possible today."
Dr Jeremy Coles of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is the GridPP production manager, responsible for making sure the Grid works on a day-to-day basis. He is giving the main GridPP talk in Nottingham, and stresses, "There are a lot of challenges in front of us as we expand our production Grid. In addition to the technical problems involved in providing a well-monitored, stable Grid, we need to address wider issues, in particular encouraging an open sharing of resources between groups of users."
In Nottingham, conference delegates will be able to see how the particle physics Grid works. GridPP has developed a map that shows computing jobs moving around LCG in real time, as they are distributed to the most suitable sites on the Grid, run their programmes and then return their results home. The map can be seen here. Dr Dave Colling, from Imperial College, London, whose team built the map, said, "It can be difficult for people who have never seen a Grid working to imagine what it does. Our map is an easy way to see how a Grid can let scientists use resources all over the world, from their desktop. It's also useful for experts, who can easily see how well the Grid's working."
Professor Tony Doyle, leader of GridPP, explained, "This is a great achievement for particle physics and for e-Science. We now have a true international working Grid, running more than 5,000 computing jobs at a time. Our next aim is to scale up the computing power available by a factor of ten, so that we'll have 10,000 computers in the UK alone, ready for the Large Hadron Collider in 2007"
imagine a beowulf cluster of Half-Life 2 preloads! ;-)
Fenimor can't make hyperlinks.... :)
Get your own free personal location tracker
The CERN link should look like this.
physicists enable torrent animals pedestrians engulf tree-nesting animals Polka Ensues from Trouncing Animals Police Escape from Tricky Animals Penguins for the Energetic Tazing of Animals
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CERN, Europe's answer to Al Gore.
I found a picture of the system here. You may have to zoom in a bit to see individual machines.
You are not the customer.
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Making Free IPods Pay Off
they found themselves being upstaged by claria or some other spyware company with their legion of zombie computers.. :-P
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Getting the physics right has been an important part of many of our favorite 3D games lately...
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Did anyone else read that as the Large Hardon Collider Computing Grid, or was it just me?
I am not sure how they define largest...
;)
Are these 6000 super computers? Or just other computers?
Distributed.net had around 330 thousand participants on the latest completed rc5 key.They had 15 thousand active on the last day of the challenge.
I would say this is much larger in computer numbers, but since they dont mention almost any usefull information in the article, I'm not sure if more computer power would be in the d.net.
However the line: By 2007, this Grid will have the equivalent of 100,000 of today's fastest computers working together to produce a 'virtual supercomputer', which can be expanded and developed as needed
So right now it isnt even 100 thousand computers, maybe not even close, so the computing power might be similar. (assuming 15 thousand active computers on d.net)
Either way, right now i highly doubt its the largest
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
for when your particle collider needs that little push over the cliff..
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
That writeup looks a lot like the one at The Register -- which came out a good two days early, the same day the results were actually announced at the AHM conference.
Erm, I think I read that wrong.
...and also the SI unit for child pornography!
Can it run Longhorn?
Grid computing has been a target for IT developers and scientists for more than five years. It allows scientists to access computer power and data from around the world seamlessly, without needing to know where the computers are.
The key word here is "seamlessly." The problem with a world grid is the latency introduced by communication between nodes. If a computation is dependent on results from another computation happening half way around the world, I cannot see how a world grid can compete against a linux cluster. Besides, unless there is provision for redundancy (sorry, I did not read the entire article), a critical node may be down due to a power outage or something as mundane as the cleaning people turning off the computer. This would bring everything to a halt.
like we don't see that *every* time a hadron collider shows up..
If a computation is dependent on results from another computation happening half way around the world, I cannot see how a world grid can compete against a linux cluster.
Think superscalar execution strategies in CPUs scaled up - got a branch dependency, compute both branches and cancel the one that doesn't apply...
Why is there a link to some crackpots theory of physics at the bottom of this article? Is this not a reputable source?
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
One of my buddies was an early numerical modeller. If I learned one thing from him it was that all the computer power in the world was no use if your model was even slightly defective. The models tended to 'blow up'. Imagine a hundred foot wall of water moving majestically down the estuary.
Typical of stories about these giant computers, they don't really describe the problems they intend to solve. In a way, that is the more interesting story. Mind you, that story is much harder to tell if you want your audience to understand it.
Imagine if they had a super big worldwide "grid" of computers all connected via some common protocol! It would be amazing!
Meh.
They could have had to cut down entire forests for the paper needed to do the math by hand.
Life is not for the lazy.
I was under the impression that the world's largest working grid was the United Devices grid.org project. They have over 2.5 million registered users and average over 300,000 work units returned every day. check out www.grid.org They are also doing real science.
nt
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
/. != place for people to whine about people posting links for things in their sigs. /. = place where (some) smart people come, and can decide whether or not to click a link, and whether or not to participate in something
True, and this makes it difficult for people who want to calculate protein folding or predict next weeks weather. But for particle physics computations we hardly need any communication between nodes at all. Rather, we need something simulated a huge amount of times (as in, "simulate this proton-proton collision 10 billion times") or "apply this fancy pattern recognition algorithm to each of these billions of events we took this week". Particle physics computations are to a large extent parallel in nature from the beginning.
The grid related problems faced in particle physics are of another nature, such as ensuring that the data is copied around the various grid facilities as needed and of ensuring that even if a given node fails to execute its job for some reason it is rerun elsewhere automatically - that sort of thing.
Is anyone else thinking here comes the Forbin Project!?
The grid related problems faced in particle physics are of another nature, such as ensuring that the data is copied around the various grid facilities as needed and of ensuring that even if a given node fails to execute its job for some reason it is rerun elsewhere automatically - that sort of thing.
I appreciate your input on this matter. I tend to look at things from an AI/neural network perpective. So I thought, there is no way a brain could be simulated on a world grid because timing is crucial to the brain's operation. However, I can see where repetitive computations on isolated (although related) problems can benefit immensely from a world grid. Thanks for clarifying this.
til we can get this as a laptop? And can you do something about the battery life?
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
640 petabytes of memory should be enough for anyone, ever.
Although, if 640kb sounded anything like 640 petabytes does now, I'll have to rape moores law over a barrell and say I doubt we will ever have computers with 640petabytes of ram as standard.
Of course, I say that in jest, I would love for future people to read this post and laugh thier tits off (some futuristic velcro tits no doubt)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
How long until there are so many of these connected online that it becomes self-aware and tries to kill humanity off ?
If this thing gets infected with NetSky what happens to civilisation ?
You'll have to zoom very hard since CERN is in Switzerland.
i was just thinking, why don't they put this ... wouldn't that work?
LHC detector thingy on a scale and if they acctually
get this higgs boson thing in the detector the
detector machine would gain some mass, e.g. would
get heavier
Check out these links for details, there is a lot of work in this area. Comparing this to @Home type projects is the wrong way to go... each node on the grid can be a gatekeeper to a cluster, where a parallel job is run. The problems involved are more complex than what a centralized server/organization can take care of.
y /gr-design.html/
http://www.globus.org//
http://www.ggf.org//
http://www.globusworld.com//
Some details.. much more out there.
http://www.grids-center.org/news/clusterworld//
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/grid/librar
http://www.casa-sotomayor.net/gt3-tutorial//
Plus, lots of academic papers out there.. this is a pretty interesting subject.