'The Grid'

As promised from early on, I shall now tell you about 'the Grid'. In a way, i wish Physicists had a greater sense for melodrama and excitment. I would have called 'the Grid' 'The Matrix' instead. Just cause it sounds cooler and is linked with the film of the same name and all that that means:-)

Anyhow, 'the Grid' (TG from now on) isn't a new invention by CERN. You may already be familiar with it in the form of SETI@home. The project where information from SETI is processed on your home computer to help in the search of extraterrestials. 'Google' is also another example of TG although it is a bit difficult to explain. (It is 1am in the morning and coke just doesn't have enough caffeine to keep my mind working fully.)

The difference with TG is that instead of just sending information to individual computers, the aim is to share computing resources in a community. (i.e. It's a bit like a group of farmers sharing each other's tools rather than everyone getting one each of every tool). This should mean that the computing power available to Scientists will be much greater than even a single super computer! (i.e. The whole world will be a massive processor... a bit like Skynet from the Terminator movies:-))

So why the need for incredible computing power? The reason is that the LHC is going to need a lot of processing power to handle and anlayse all the information it is going to receive. It has been estimated that 1% of the whole world's data production in one year will be produced at the LHC.

Another way to say this is that one year's worth of data from the LHC would have to be stored on 20 000 000 CDs. It would require 100,000 of today's PC's to satisfy the CPU power required!

To make TG possible, we must be able to send information from one place to another quickly. Research and developments has meant it is now possible for CERN to send information at speeds of 10 Gigabytes/s!!!! This means it is quicker to send 10 gigabyte of information from CERN to Vancouer quicker than it takes to write it to a hard drive!!! Talk about the world getting smaller.

Of course all of this is still in the theory stages. There has been steps to connect Universities in the same countries together. Links have also been made with computing centres from different continents. However world-wide TG connection is still a while away!!!!!

For more information check these out:-

www.gridcafe.org

www.LHC@home (not sure if this one works... Google it!)