Key Milestone Reached In Global grid

CERN announces the successful completion of major milestone in the ambitious grid project that it is pursuing. A huge 100,000-PC grid-computing network being built to help research the origin of the universe passed the third of four major tests recently when it reached a data-transfer milestone, with up to 1GB/sec. of physics data sent over the global grid. The data was transferred from CERN in Geneva to 12 major computer centers around the globe. More than 20 computing facilities at universities and colleges were also used in the testing. The data transfers were made to analyze real-time storage, distribution and analysis of the data while the grid is being built and refined. The completion of this service challenge is a key milestone on the way to establishing the necessary computing infrastructure for the Large Hadron Collider(LHC), the world’s largest scientific instrument. The results represent a significant step forward compared to a previous service challenge in early 2005 that had involved just seven centres in Europe and the USA, and achieved sustained rates of 600 megabytes per second. The grid will also be able to store some 15 petabytes of data - 15 million gigabytes annually to start with , and will have to be continually expanded because the data will have to be continuously preserved for analysis and that’s why the need for distributed storage becomes critical. Planetgrid should be in a position to store and process data that it thousand times more than the volume of printed material indexed by Library of congress. This is an important experiment wherein some 150 universities and research labs worldwide will be connected to this system, all providing some degree of processing capability.The grid is expected to go live next year. With a successful completion of this such facilities/services could appear in the other sectors. Like the internet moving from academia to industry creating huge impact, this could also create a large impact in the technology world. Grid computing is beginning to see action at the enterprise level as well- besides applications in molecular research. Recognizing this various technology vendors are beginning to make moves. EMC acquiring software/ partnering with acxiom to offer hosted grid storage services and eventually help users build out more scalable and flexible grid-based storage. With EMC owning VmWare and with Globus alliance putting efforts behind combining grid and virtualization technologies, growth opportunities increase several times. Recently, ClearCube Technology and DataSynapse have partnered to deliver a grid-enabled PC blade platform. The companies claim the hardware and software combination is the first of its kind for the financial services and insurance industry. Financial services and insurance firms have been among the leading adopters of computing grids to run complex portfolio analysis, capital reserve, risk assessment and actuarial models, a market DataSynapse has been dominant in. By combining DataSynapse's GridServer software with ClearCube's PC Blade platform, financial enterprises will have a grid computing solution that provides greater performance, efficiency and scalability. Enterprise software shall also get influenced/affected by the advances in grid technologies.Grid technologies are showing strong signs of being a game changer in the technology industry..