Content about grid computing

Neasan O'Neill finds how Ernesto Garcia is putting the grid to good use in his research of investigating what is going on at the atomic level in chemical reactions.

To sort through an Arabic language database and separate words according to their root might take an ordinary person about a year. But Majdi Sawalha did it in less than a week.

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.

During a Science Hack Day, designers, developers, scientists and other geeks spend an intense 48-hour period together to see what they can make using science. This year, some hacked smartphones so they'd operate as an earthquake warning system, while others simulated synaestheia using a vibrating mask. And research associate Matt Belis, from Northern Illinois University,  took along some data from the CMS detector at CERN to see what they could produce.

What is high throughput parallel computing, and what does it take to make a grid HTPC-ready? Read on to find out!

Today’s biologists face a difficult problem: their treasure trove of protein structures is exciting, but of little use if they don’t know what those proteins are for.

The Protein Data Bank, where data about proteins with known structures are stored, contains millions of proteins that scientists can freely access. But in most cases, the biological purpose of those proteins is unknown.

What will particle physicists be studying after the 27 kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider at CERN has given up all the secrets it knows about the Universe?

Designs are being made for the particle accelerators and detectors of the future, building upon knowledge gained by the LHC by smashing together particles that we can just barely control today. CLIC is one of these, a linear accelerator that would smash together electrons and their anti-matter twin, positrons.

No, it's not the latest computer game, but new academic simulations to model potentially chaotic public disorder scenarios.

The quest to produce power from fusion is back on track after the test-bed reactor JET restarted successfully. But some serious challenges, which require heavy computing, still lie on the scientists' path between here and realising their dream.

Scientists are installing extremely sensitive infra-red cameras to find tiny hot-spots in the walls of the container, which might show why and where energy is lost. And they must also tackle one of the most important unsolved problems of classical physics: turbulance.

A team from the Netherlands has mimicked a global attack on the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, and released their results at a technical forum in Lyon, France, last week.