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October 20, 2003

CERN Goes Live with Huge Grid Project, Seeks Aid from Vendors

Although CERN has gone live with phase one of its massive commuting Grid to process the 12PB of data generated yearly by its particle beam accelerator, Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the organization is looking for commercial IT vendors to provide resources to complete the project.

CERN will, in return, offer vendors the opportunity to use the Grid to test their own Grid projects.

Due to be complete by 2007, the LHC Grid will need power equal to 70,000 PCs to analyze the output of the LHC, which will collide protons at high energy to probe the nature of matter.

Eventually, the LHC Grid, which is currently live with eight sites, will become a worldwide service, utilizing the resources of computing centers around the world.

IBM has donated its TotalStorage file management system to handle the distributed data, including 28TB of high-end storage installed this week. TotalStorage uses a single virtual file naming to cover all data, irrespective of location or operating system type.

Both CERN and IBM need to know it will work within a Grid scaling to what will be a larger storage environment than anything that exists today.

In the next two years the Grid should expand to around 80 sites, incorporating a European grid of 70 locations, scaling to a further 200 sites including the United States and Asia by the time the LHC is live.

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