Comment pc clusers at cern (Score 1) 311
Last week I have been to cern (I am a physics student at the university of karlsruhe) for a two day visit. We have been in the server "room", pardon, hall is the better word. It is filled with hundreds of standard Intel PCs equipped with some Athlon CPU and Redhat-Linux, all interconnected to a big computing grid. Cern and several universities and science facilites (caltech, fermilab to name just two) all over the world are currently working on a big interconnected data storage and computing grid, which is supposed to work on the result data from the new LHC collider at Cern (LHC will be finished in 2006 or 7, I am not sure).
Every physicist working on this giant project (somewhat multiple thounsand from all over the world) can login into this grid (which is btw. completely built with open source software!) and work on data which for example could be stored in a data centre in Japan. But the calculations would be done by some small cluster in Spain with some help from some other universities. This new grid software can provide data and computing power from all over the world, without any interaction from the user.
Very exciting and very impressive.
More Information can be found here:
http://www.eu-datagrid.org
http://lcg.web.cern. ch/LCG/
Every physicist working on this giant project (somewhat multiple thounsand from all over the world) can login into this grid (which is btw. completely built with open source software!) and work on data which for example could be stored in a data centre in Japan. But the calculations would be done by some small cluster in Spain with some help from some other universities. This new grid software can provide data and computing power from all over the world, without any interaction from the user.
Very exciting and very impressive.
More Information can be found here:
http://www.eu-datagrid.org
http://lcg.web.cern
