Grid computing project gets £30 million boost

gallery

A grid computing project connected to a major Cern experiment has received an extra £30 million in funding.

The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), which funds research and education in the UK, has extended its funding of the GridPP project to cover the third phase of the project until 2011.

The GridPP project is designing a grid computing system to analyse data from Geneva-based research institute Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

"The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is the world's largest physics experiment, recreating conditions last seen just after the Big Bang in order to better understand our universe," Professor Keith Mason, the chief executive of PPARC said in a statement on the GridPP website. "The detectors will register a deluge of data at up to 15GB per second - or three DVDs every second. To store and manage this data requires a new approach - the Grid."

The Grid project has about ten thousand processors at 17 locations in the UK, which will increase to 20 thousand by 2011 with the new funding.

The project leader, Dr David Britton of Imperial College London, said: "This funding takes us in to the most exciting phase of GridPP, testing all the work that has gone before as we start receiving the LHC data and providing it to the users - scientists all around the UK eager to take part in the likely scientific breakthroughs. Without GridPP they would be excluded from the exciting discoveries that will be made in particle physics in the next few years."

Indeed, the last time Cern had a major experiment with a bit of an IT problem, there was a major development by UK scientist Sir Tim Berners Lee.

"Cern's last large experiment had a similar problem and as a result the World Wide Web was developed there," said Mason. "In a few years, the Grid may be as familiar to home users as the web is today."

The PPARC funded the first two phases of GridPP, with the first phase receiving £17 million for work from 2001 to 2004, and the second receiving £15.9 million from 2004 to this year.

Email to a friend

Print this page