Grid Computing

Description:

Imagine several million computers from all over the world, and owned by thousands of different people. Imagine they include desktops, laptops, supercomputers, data vaults, and instruments like mobile phones, meteorological sensors and telescopes…

Now imagine that all of these computers can be connected to form a single, huge and super-powerful computer! This huge, sprawling, global computer is “The Grid”. Grid computing not only provides the resources that allow our scientists to cope with vast collections of data, it also allows this data to be distributed all over the world, which means scientific teams can work on international projects from the comfort of their own laboratories. The Grid was invented at the European Organization for Nuclear ResearchCERN, and the reason was the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator.

What is LHC?

Scientists first divide the project into smaller pieces. Then they assign each computer one of these small pieces of the problem. After each computer solves its piece, it sends its answer back to a central computer, where all the pieces are combined into a final solution. This process enables scientists to solve their problems often a hundreds of times faster than they could with their existing laboratory computers.

Video explaining Grid Computing:

Activities:
Via tryscience.org games students can get an overview of some existing data and computationally intensive scientific tasks. They can get an idea what IT infrastructures are available to solve these problems, and what are the pros and cons of them.

Examples:
Interactive video/game explaining the difference between personal, grid computing and supercomputers: http://tryscience.org/grid/home.html

Collection of various programmes and applications that demonstrate or simulate the Grid in action: http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/demos/