Question of the Week

What is the grid?

What about this new super internet system called the grid that’s being developed to handle the level and volume of data that’s going to be coming out of the LHC? Alan, listening on REM fm

Tara: The grid is like the next step up from the World Wide Web, if you like. Just as anybody with the computer and internet access can share information on the web so particle physicists can plug all their computers together. They have internet access and some special software that makes them all work together and come up with a distributed supercomputer that not only shares information but also the computing power of all the computers they have together. If you consider how big our experiments are, about 2000 people from 80 countries typically in the case of ATLAS. If all these institutions share their computers then they effectively make a supercomputer which is powerful enough to analyse the huge amounts of data that we need to analyse from the LHC to make our discoveries.

September 2008