jbrodkin brings us a story about the development of the personal network supporting CERN’s Massive Hadron Collider, which will start smashing particles into one another later this year. We’ve discussed some of the impressive abilities of this network in the past. “Data will be gathered from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which hosts the collider in France and Switzerland, and distributed to thousands of scientists throughout the world. One writer described the grid as a ‘parallel World wide web.’ Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid, which oversees the U.S. infrastructure for the LHC network, describes it as an ‘evolution of the World wide web.’ New fiber-optic cables with special protocols will be used to move data from CERN to 11 Tier-1 sites around the globe, which in turn use standard World wide web technologies to transfer the data to more than 150 Tier-2 centers. Worldwide, the LHC computing grid will be comprised of about 20,000 servers, primarily running the Linux operating system. Scientists at Tier-2 sites can access these servers remotely when running complex experiments based on LHC data, Pordes says. If scientists need a million CPU hours to run an experiment overnight, the distributed nature of the grid allows them to access that computing power from any part of the worldwide network”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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