CERN and ‘the grid’

http://www.business-standard.com/common/news_article.php?autono=319376&leftnm=4&subLeft=0&chkFlg

The first years of the new century have seen a dramatic increase in the number of internet users (1.3 billion — or 20 per cent of the world population), usage and bandwidth demand as new patterns of usage (Web 2.0) grow exponentially. Against this backdrop now comes the promise of a superfast internet, based on technology which has the computing power to change the way in which future generations collaborate and communicate. The technology is an offshoot of the ‘Big Bang’ idea from the European Centre for Nuclear Research — often referred to as ‘The Birthplace of the Internet’ — which is being used to increase the speed of the internet by almost 10,000 times.

The action started when CERN began working on a much-debated plan 15 years ago to recreate the Big Bang. Despite opposition, the technology is complete and now in a cooling process. On the ‘Red Button Day’ (later this summer), scientists will turn on CERN’s particle accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and also open ‘The Grid’. The 27-km-long LHC will shoot beams of protons at one another in a bid to recreate conditions similar to those that followed the Big Bang. This will produce enough data each year to fill 56 million CDs. The data cannot be stored locally. It needs a network capable of handling and analysing enormous amounts of data — which explains the need of a grid.

Check out this article which is talking about CERN and it’s work with grid computing, it’s an interesting read and illustrates the use of grid technology - very cool.