Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

Article Category

News
Content archived on 2023-03-02

Article available in the following languages:

'Mappa Mundi' of Grid computing now available

A new interactive map showing the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) infrastructure and eight of the other world's largest computing Grids is now available. The map, developed by researchers from GridPP in the UK and the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, in Geneva,...

A new interactive map showing the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) infrastructure and eight of the other world's largest computing Grids is now available. The map, developed by researchers from GridPP in the UK and the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, in Geneva, uses Google Earth to pinpoint Grid sites on six continents, showing more than 300 sites overall. Like the medieval 'mappa mundi', which showed what was known of the world at the time, this map is one of the first attempts to show the whole scientific Grid world. Gidon Moont from Imperial College London, who developed the interface with Google Earth, said: 'It's very exciting that we can, for the first time, see these major Grids together on one map. Interoperation will be a key area for the future of the Grid, and the map will show how it grows.' Grid sites are displayed on Google Earth using a KML file. When this file is opened in Google Earth the locations of the Grid sites are added to the Google Earth map. Clicking on each site gives the name and location of the site, and identifies the Grid to which it belongs. The map queries a database that includes site information from the following Grids: - Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (worldwide); - Open Science Grid (mainly USA); - Nordic Data Grid Facility (mainly Scandinavia); - NAREGI (Japan); - TeraGrid (USA); - PRAGMA (Pacific Rim); - Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (Europe); - National Grid Service (UK); - Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (Australia). The EGEE Grid project is co-funded by the European Commission. It consists of over 20,000 CPUs (central processing units) available to users 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in addition to about 5 Petabytes (5 million Gigabytes) of storage. It maintains around 20,000 concurrent jobs. Having such resources available means that it is ideal for any scientific research where the time and resources needed for running the applications are considered impractical when using traditional IT infrastructures. Originating from two scientific fields - high energy physics and life sciences - EGEE now integrates applications from many other scientific fields, ranging from geology to computational chemistry. As Albert Einstein said, 'Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.'