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The international Virtual Data Grid Laboratory
(iVDGL) is a consortium of 15 universities, 4 national laboratories, and several
partecipating foreign institutions connected by a global network of powerful
computers at 40 locations in the U.S., Europe and Asia, called Tier Centers.
The aim of iVDGL is to serve as a unique resource for testing the basic software
and computational paradigms at the Petabyte scale and beyond that
GriPhyN and other international data
grid projects (such as e.g. Data Grid)
will provide.
To this end, the international laboratory will link the resources of very
many different sites in the world into a single an
powerful computational engine able to process huge amounts of scientific
data across national and international borders. Being the largest Grid
network facility ever built, in terms of number of sites, geographical
distribution and data capacity, the iVDGL is a rather unique Grid environment
at present.
The University of Florida and the University of Chicago are leading this
effort. The others major Tier 1 and 2 places are California Institute of
Technology, the University of California San Diego, Indiana University,
Boston University, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Madison, Pennsylvania
State University, John Hopkins University, Northwestern University and
the University of Southern California.
Partecipating national laboratories are
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Brookhaven National Accelerator
Laboratory, Argonne National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford Linear
Accelerator Laboratory. Many universities in Europe, Asia and Australia
will also take part.
Since the participants in the U.S. funded Grid
are diverse, including three predominantly minority universities (tier
3 centers): Hampton University, Salish Kootenai College and the University
of Texas at Brownsville.
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The international Virtual Data
Grid Laboratory.
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Four experiments are committed to developing highly distributed data
analysis infrastructures. These infrastructures are distributed both for technical
reasons (e.g., to place computational and data resources near to demand) and
for strategic reasons (e.g., to leverage existing technology investments). ATLAS
and CMS are the most ambitious, anticipating a need for aggregate data rates
of ~100 Gbytes/sec, around 60 TeraOps of fully-utilized computing power, and
the fastest feasible wide area networks, including several OC-48 links into CERN.
Their hierarchical worldwide Data Grid system is organized in "Tiers,"
where Tier 0 is the central facility at CERN, Tier 1 is a national center, Tier 2 a
center covering one region of a large country such as the US or a smaller country,
Tier 3 a workgroup server, and Tier 4 the (thousands of) desktops (see figure).
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The international Virtual Data
Grid Laboratory.
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