The LHC Grid - Distributing Big Bang Data Worldwide
Wednesday September 10, 2008
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is coming online in Europe today. Assuming this gigantic particle acceleration system works as designed, it will begin generating more scientific data than most of us can comprehend. That's where the worldwide LHC Computing Grid (LCG) comes in.
This network of thousands of computers is an impressive implementation of grid computing. Capable of processing 15 million gigabytes of data per year, LCG distributes data to thousands of researchers in 32 countries. Even at that scale, it's not clear the network will be able to keep up with the reliability and scale of the Collider itself. Wow.
→ See also - GridView - Monitoring and Visualization Tool for the LHC Computing Grid
why don’t they rely on some other methods such as Distributed Computer projects? I believe BOINC from Berkley is a good example. LHC scientists take note here.
If you open your data network to allow home users to contribute their spare cpu cycles in such a manner you could add amazing amounts of processing.
If you were to develop an opensource client or make a standard api for this, perhaps linux ceators would include such software in their repositories and even more people could add to your distributed computing number crunching powerhouse network.
i’ve been crunching for seti@home since 2001 and always have the option to add a project and delegate a few more cores for your research project, as I’m sure many others would.