Content about grid computing

Grid computing is helping scientists to design cheaper and greener plastics for everyday use.

This year's Turing Festival had a session called CERN: Big Questions, Big Science, Big Technology. Speakers talked about its history of physics theory, engineering, and computing.

On 21 June 2012, 12 winners of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair awards competition, organized by the Society For Science and The Public, in the US, visited CERN. Their achievements include a visualization tool that could help reduce global CO² and a faster code to solve non-linear equations – their average age was 17 years old. We caught up with four whose projects were driven by computing.

Climate change, overfishing, natural and manmade disasters, and loss of habitat all threaten the biodiversity of our oceans. There is an urgent need for more effective management to ensure sustainable fisheries for future generations and to maintain biodiversity in the oceans by protecting the entire ecosystem. iMarine (www.i-marine.eu) is gaining traction as a very important initiative driving smarter, more efficient and cost-effective approaches for a sustainable future while maintaining responsibility towards nature.

Natural disasters claim thousands of lives and cause billions in economic damage each year. We look at five promising research projects that use the latest computational methods to predict or forecast these devastating events and their effects.

You only have a few days left for a chance to win a prize from our goodies bag. All you have to do to enter is complete our short and anonymous readership survey.

Last month, we brought you news about the Square Kilometre Array. Now, we have wind of another ambitious telescope. On 1st July, the Royal Society celebrates the discovery of cosmic rays centenary. One project on show will give new glimpses into the highest-energy universe, processing up to 25 petabytes per year; as much data as CERN manages today, which may require a new worldwide computing grid.

This June 22 and 23 mark the birthdays of two visionaries of computing: Konrad Zuse and Alan Turing. The well known Alan Turing laid groundwork for many theories of computation, one of which was crucial in the allies winning the war. Less well known is Zuse, a civil engineer who worked independently in a Germany under Nazi rule. He built the world’s first programmable computer that counted in binary.