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'."

Comments

Seamlessly? I doubt it. Latency is a big problem

[Louis Savain]

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.