Talk:Worldwide LHC Computing Grid
I have rewritten this article as it is essentially a copy paste of a times online article, which isn't cool. It is important for this item to stay around though, its an incredibly important piece of science. I'm just leaving it as a sentence or 2 for right now. -Hellkyte
Seems fairly notatable, its a large scale scientific project, lots of press. I'm removing the notability tag.Ethyr (talk) 18:47, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
After reviewing the first reference, I changed "1 gigabit" to "1 gigabyte," as the reference says "1GB per second." Note: Gb (gigabit) is not the same as GB (gigabyte). JMacalinao (talk) 01:51, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
Confusion and/or Hype About Purported Data Speeds
Recently, there has been wide spread media coverage and a huge number of articles and documents that have mentioned the number 10,000 as the ratio for comparing the speed of "the grid" to the Internet. Accordingly, most of the six references cited in the subject Wikipedia article reference this number as well. For a better perspective, I Google’d "'the grid' +CERN +10,000" and received over 14,000 responses.
However, when I attempted to establish a perspective on the origin of this number, I found that this number appears to have originated as a comparison of the speed of “the grid” as compared to the speed of a standard broadband connection, which is typically between 1 and 6 Mb/s. Using the lower-end of the broadband speed range for comparison, this would establish the speed of the grid to be around 10 Gb/s (1 Mb/s times 10,000 equals 10 Gb/s)). Accordingly, this value is in reasonable agreement with the speed provide in the subject article, stated to be "1 gigabyte per second."
However, although a speed of 10 Gb/s is about 10,000 times the lower limit of broadband, it is not 10,000 times faster than the Internet backbone or core-link speeds. According the Wikipedia article for "Core Router," in 2007 core router speeds have reached 10 Gb/s, with some links being operated at 40 Gb/s. This equates present core speeds being one to four times faster than the Grid. Accordingly, it would appear that the significance of the the Grid is that it is capable of transmitting data at speeds around 10 Gb/s over extemely long distances.