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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'."
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.