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World's Largest Working Computing Grid

Posted by michael on from the more-power dept.

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'."

4 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Grid vs. LHC@Home? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What's the point of the Grid thingy if they've also setup this?

    http://lhcathome.cern.ch/

  2. Coordination by erick99 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I wonder how they are coordinating the use of all of those computers? The article doesn't say that they will be exclusively for this project and, if they are not, then that is some task to have them all online and not otherwise busy. They must have some damned serious storage vaults as well if they are generating 15 Petabytes a year of data, which doesn't include the output from processing. Still, it must be something to have all of the "horsepower" at your command.

    Cheers,

    Erick

    --
    http://www.busyweather.com/
  3. Largest? by anethema · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:Seamlessly? I doubt it. Latency is a big proble by tkittel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.