Friday, April 29, 2005

60 million megabytes in 10 days

A home user with a 512 kilobit per second broadband connection would be waiting 30 years to complete a download of the same size. RAL is a member of the GridPP project - the UK effort by particle physicists to prepare for the massive data volumes expected from the next generation of particle physics experiments.

Grid computing -- a form of computing cluster -- is much talked of in enterprise IT as a way of flexibly using computing power across an organization, CERN is largely paving new ground in building its grid.

CERN, the European nuclear research lab, has passed a milestone in building its worldwide data grid, sustaining a continuous data flow of an average of 600 megabytes per second (MB/s) for 10 days between eight facilities distributed through Europe and the U.S.
The service challenge is a step towards creating the reliable, high-speed distributed computing network, or grid, needed to handle the estimated 15 terabytes (TB) per year expected to be generated by photon collisions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Last month CERN completed building the 100-site grid, based in 31 countries.

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