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21 December 2011

Few laypeople think of computing innovation in connection with the Tevatron particle accelerator, which shut down earlier this year. Mention of the Tevatron inspires images of majestic machinery, or thoughts of immense energies and groundbreaking physics research, not circuit boards, hardware, networks, and software.

Yet over the course of more than three decades of planning and operation, a tremendous amount of computing innovation was necessary to keep the data flowing and physics results coming. Those innovations will continue to influence scientific computing and data analysis for years to come.

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This year, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) turned 10. It was September 2001 when the idea was concieved of and approved by the CERN council to handle the large volumes of data.

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What were you reading in 2011? We re-cap the most popular stories of the year.

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Spotlight

You Might Have Missed

 

As natural disasters strike worldwide, leaving a path of destruction and death in their wake, grids can help mitigate these hazards. Now a new web portal gives weather researchers access to the vast resources of the Grid.

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Bridging the gap between simulations with vastly different scales is the key to a wide variety of scientific breakthroughs.

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Rotors are slowed down by the turbulent wakes they leave behind in the air. But now researchers are using GPU machines to improve the fluid dynamics codes used for rotorcraft design.

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New astronomical data has been released, adding to the growing data sets that are available for public use and independent research.

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