

CERN Officially Unveils Its Grid: 100,000 Processors, 15 Petabytes a Year - qhoxie
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cern_officially_unveils_its_gr.php

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Create
There has never been a peer-reviewed comparison between the much hyped GRID
ruled by CERN, and say more discrete distributed supercomputers, like the
Storm or Kraken in terms of reliability, scalability (do you get spam?)
configurability (how quickly does your new address get spam?). It would pail
in comparison to the half dozen underground grids, not to mention a fair
comparison with EC2, GOOG back-end etc.

Actually, most experiments, doing "serious" work opted to have their own
farms, which they can handle as they please (configuration, versioning etc. --
most of the grid is still struggling with RHEL3 and gcc3, most of what sane
people cannot put up with). Parallelization amounts to breaking up data to
chunks and running the same dll in multiple instances -- no notion of
threading, let alone locking (no dependencies).

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westside1506
100,000 processors is a big-sounding number, but it might be less interesting
than the glue holding them together in this case. The dedicated 10Gbps pipe
allows much more interesting problems to be solved than a traditional grid
computer (unless the grid computer uses P2P).

One of the biggest problems that we always face with big grid computers is
that we either need computations that can be broken up into very small parts
and have very high compute/io ratios - or else we send bigger chunks of data
with VERY long computations to the grid nodes.

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jwilliams
> The dedicated 10Gbps pipe allows much more interesting problems to be solved
> than a traditional grid computer (unless the grid computer uses P2P).

Particularly as this article implies CERN is connected by dedicated 10Gbps
links to sites in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain,
Taipei, UK and the USA.

