World's biggest computing experiment

InfoWorld has information on the CERN Paticle Accelerator, currently scheduled to go live in 2007. Oracle is a participant, but the article focuses on IBM and the failure of its product to handle the enourmous storage demands.

One of the Grid's biggest hurdles is however what to do with the huge amount of data produced by the particle accelerator. It is calculated to pump out 15PB of data a year (or 34TB a day) continuously. Yet at that rate, IBM's current storage solution would be able to store just 20 hours of data. The situation will get worse over time as well, with the IT head of the project, Wolfgang von Ruden, estimating that by 2010, 100PB a year of data will come from the LHC project.

Wow that is a ton of data... the system will need to have the capability to analyze 40 million particle collisions per second, 24 hours a day, for at least 13 years.