A Look At CERN's LHC Grid-Computing Architecture 53
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by
Soulskill
from the going-for-the-gusto dept.
from the going-for-the-gusto dept.
blair1q writes "Using a four-tiered architecture (from CERN's central computer at Tier 0 to individual scientists' desk/lap/palmtops at Tier 3), CERN is distributing LHC data and computations across resources worldwide to achieve aggregate computational power unprecedented in high-energy physics research. As an example, 'researchers can sit at their laptops, write small programs or macros, submit the programs through the AliEn system, find the necessary ALICE data on AliEn servers, then run their jobs' on upper-tier systems. The full grid comprises small computers, supercomputers, computer clusters, and mass-storage data centers. This system allows 1,000 researchers at 130 organizations in 34 countries to crunch the data, which are disgorged at a rate of 1.25 GB per second from the LHC's detectors."
Re:1.25GB/sec not that much. (Score:4, Insightful)
A single 10gb ethernet connection can handle that quite easily.
Eh. A 10 Gb ethernet connection can't handle 1.25 GB/s at all, not to mention doing it reliably. Theoretically, 10 Gb is exactly 1.25 GB, but then you need to account for protocol overhead, packet loss and so on.