Surfing the World Wide Waves (WWW)

The Eurodatagrid project

The Euro datagrid project is an idea being developed at the CERN (European Centre for Nuclear Research) to find a method of sharing computer power. Within an air conditioned room at the CERN in Geneva you will find a room full of computers on shelves with several machines but shelf with around 1000 individual machines. The idea behind the datagrid project is shared computer power across a multitude of machines. In other words if you are working on some modelling, for example to see what the weather will by like in StMoritz over the next few days. You make a request over the Internet for a certain amount of computer power and send the data along fibre optic links towards the CERN where an allocated number of machines will help crunch the numbers to give you results about possible weather patterns.

The idea is particularly interesting because in sharing the task among many computers a cheap super computer is working but rather than having a single machine which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent per day you have many more affordable part time machines doing the work.

Articles by Richard Azia unless otherwise indicated.

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