Tech Shout!

An experiment to run an international scientific computing grid under working conditions, which lasted for as entire week has resulted in constant transfer rates of a gigabyte per second; announced the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid collaboration (WLCG) at the Computing for High Energy and Nuclear Physics 2006 conference in Mumbai.

Tony Doyle, leader of the UK particle physics grid, said that corresponds to transferring a DVD worth of scientific data every five seconds. “At these rates it would take 25 days to transfer the nearly 400,000 films listed at IMDB.com and only an hour and a half to transfer the 1,000 films produced each year by Mumbai-based Bollywood.”

The data was transferred from CERN in Switzerland to 12 other computer centres, with the UK end being the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

RAL works with sites at UK universities to form GridPP, the UK particle physics grid, consisting of over 4,000 CPUs and 250 terabytes of storage.