Old World, New Grid

by Fabrizio Gagliardi & Francois Grey IEEE Spectrum, July 2006 Sometime next year the largest scientific instrument ever built will come to life in an underground complex in Switzerland. The Large Hadron Collider will send two beams of protons in opposite directions around a 27-kilometer-long circular tunnel. The beams will collide head-on, producing a shower of subatomic fragments that scientists expect will include exotic, never-before-seen particles that could change our fundamental knowledge of the universe. Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research know that spotting the elusive bits of matter they are looking for will be a daunting task. They will have to sift through a colossal haystack of collision data: some 15 million gigabytes a year. Their solution? A vast collection of high-powered computer systems scattered in nearly 200 research centers around the world, networked and configured to function as a single parallel processing system. Read more