Slashdot Mirror
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'."
In Grid computing, which is not exactly the same as high-performance computing, the number of flops doesn't really matter that much, it's more about providing an environment for multiple users to address problems that can be solved by splitting it up in a huge number of smaller tasks.
your joke being funny not withstanding, that's a map of America, probably the least relevant place to show for this particular project.
CERN and Grid is European, notably Switzerland, France and UK.
the USA has plenty of great particle physics of its own (excitable New Yorkers beware - there's a particle accelerator on your doorstep - think of the children!) but this is not one of them.
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.
The LCG resources have several different things that most home machines do not:
1) A Linux install with the requisite libraries for the already-written experiment analysis programs to run on.
2) Fast network interconnects, both to other LCG cluster nodes at the same site (using Myrinet, Infiniband, etc.) and large network connections to other participating sites (ie 100Mbit+).
3) Large amounts of reliable local storage, ie 1TB+.
SETI@Home-like distributed computing problems only work well for problems which do not require large amounts of communication between nodes before, during, and after an individual run. Many problems do not fall into this category.
[80s]So funny I forgot to laugh[/80s]
People are mostly using "Scientific Linux", an in-CERN-house Redhat fork, but some sites are experimenting with other stuff - one of the computer science aspects of the grid is researching how to make good use of heterogenous systems, though different linux distros aren't amazingly heterogenous in the grand scheme of things, there are challenges.
And yes, there are people working on Gentoo, believe it or not.
And Debian and fedora core 2 and 3 and mandrake clic and suse.
And IRIX, AIX, Solaris and Mac OS X from the Real Unix camp.
And there's some poor fuckers somewhere working on windows too.
Because the Earth is a LOT brighter than the stars (because the stars are far away), and to properly expose the Earth onto whatever media is being used(film, CCD, whatever), less exposure is needed than would be necissary to pick up any stars (save the sun).
Just like pictures from the moon - you'll not see any stars in pictures taken of the moon on the moon (by Neil Armstron et al).
Hope that helps
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.