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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
CERN GOES LIVE WITH HUGE GRID
PROJECT, SEEKS AID FROM VENDORS
Although Cern has gone live with phase one of its massive comuting Grid to
process the 12PB of data generated yearly by its particle beam accelerator,
Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the organization is looking for commercial IT
vendors to provide resources to complete the project.
Cern will, in return, offer vendors the opportunity to use the Grid to test
their own Grid projects.
Due to be complete by 2007, the LHC Grid will need power equal to 70,000
PCs
to analyze the output of the LHC, which will collide protons at high energy to
probe the nature of matter.
Eventually, the LHC Grid, which is currently live with eight sites, will
become a worldwide service, utilizing the resources of computing centers
around the world.
IBM has donated its TotalStorage file management system to handle the
distributed data, including 28TB of high-end storage installed this week.
TotalStorage uses a single virtual file naming to cover all data, irrespective
of location or operating system type.
Both Cern and IBM need to know it will work within a Grid scaling to what
will
be a larger storage environment than anything that exists today.
In the next two years the Grid should expand to around 80 sites,
incorporating
a European grid of 70 locations, scaling to a further 200 sites including the
United States and Asia by the time the LHC is live.
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