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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Data speeds

The rambling about the speed is ridiculous. I removed the whole irrelevant blop of crap. Discuss and argue here instead of on the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.248.255.250 (talk) 18:26, 24 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

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 provided in the subject article, stated to be "1 gigabyte per second."

However, although a speed of 10 Gb/s is about 10,000 times faster than the lower limit of broadband, it is not 10,000 times faster than the Internet backbone or core-link speeds. According to the Wikipedia article titled "Core Router," in 2007 core router speeds 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 and not 10,000 times slower, as could be mistakenly concluded from these articles. 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.

BillinSanDiego (talk) 04:51, 15 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I completely agree. My brother showed me this article and mentioned some of the hype around it and I scoffed when I saw the "10,000 times faster" part, especially with the way it was worded. I've edited the page to better explain things. If someone wants thinks it needs to be clarified better, be my guest. Bobbias (talk) 18:24, 26 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

GB != Gb

See slide 26 of "LCG TDR presentation at the Open LHCC Session". That shows throughput to tier 1 as about 800 MB / sec. That implies that the ceiling is (order of magnitude) 1GByte/sec, meaning 10GBit/sec.

This is why I changed the "dedicated 10GB/sec" to "10Gb/sec"