Update 23: News from UKP.eB

BEYOND THE INTERNET

The European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN) is building the largest particle accelerator ever near Geneva in order to enhance our knowledge of the fundamental components of Nature. This is due to open in 2007. It comprises a 27km circular tunnel in which the particles are accelerated to vast speeds at close to absolute zero temperature. The resultant collisions generate huge amounts of data – a gigabyte per second. Current computing solutions are totally inadequate for receiving and processing such volumes of data. Therefore, GRID computing has been developed ( also know as Utility or On Demand computing). This involves linking a series of smaller computers with a new generation of silicon chips, and also new types of processor interlinking, rather than trying to develop a new generation of super computers. For example, a new Intel chip has a data transfer rate of 5.4 gigabyte per second and some new linking software (Infiniband) is expected to function at from 30gb per sec up to 120gb per sec.

These new Grid computers are expected to enhance not only nuclear physics, but also health research (biomedical grids such as those for mining genomic databases), meteorology, data mining of commercial data warehouses, battlespace management, and multi-player games.

Just remember, it was Sir Tim Berners Lee who developed the World Wide Web software at CERN.

For more information see www.cern.ch/openlab