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

At last

[modest apricot]

Finally, something to run doom3 on. Though I may still have to turn shadows off...

able to handle 15 petabytes a year?

[djfray]

finally something to deal with those pesky environmentalists.... :-P

Images

[Limburgher]

I found a picture of the system here. You may have to zoom in a bit to see individual machines.

Re:Images

[rokzy]

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.

Coordination

[erick99]

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

Re:Computing power

[kristofme]

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.

Physics

[penguinoid]

Getting the physics right has been an important part of many of our favorite 3D games lately...

Largest?

[anethema]

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 ;)

10?

[real_smiff]

why a factor of 10? why not take it to.. eleven.

for when your particle collider needs that little push over the cliff..

Copycat writeup

[David McBride]

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.

Re:Grid vs. LHC@Home?

[David McBride]

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.

Large Hardon Collider?!

[Hitmen]

Erm, I think I read that wrong.

Re:Seamlessly? I doubt it. Latency is a big proble

[tkittel]

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.