Virtualization and Grid Computing

Go Ask ALICE, the iSGTW image of the week. (Funny headline, see Go_Ask_Alice).

Check out some screenshots here of Nimbus resources invovled in supporting this experiment. It’s a small part of things as you can see from the scope of the grid but exciting nonetheless. The AliEn based virtual cluster is now “one-click” and can be launched anywhere running a workspace cloud setup.

[[I’m back from vacation. Look for more blog content and those search engines in the coming weeks.]]

Meanwhile, I came across this note:

One of the world’s biggest science experiments is proceeding on schedule, and grid computing will play a big role in it.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, told delegates attending the 140th meeting of the CERN Council last month that the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will be set to go in 2007.

Massive in scale, grid techniques are the only financially viable way to deal with the collider’s petabytes of data (roughly 15 PB per year is anticipated) and the resulting analysis opportunities. It is going to be interesting to follow its launch, especially with respect to the computing side and what, if any, adjustments are going to be necessary.

• You can read in detail about the computing efforts at the LHC Computing Project (LCG) site (a lot of their software is based on Globus Toolkit components under the covers).
• In 2005, the grid surpassed 100 sites (today, 177 are listed).
• There are some interesting visualizations on the LCG monitoring page.
• A good read is the September 2006 Report of the LHCC Comprehensive Review of LCG (10 pages).
• There’s a nice video about the accelerator featured by SEED magazine: Lords of the Ring.