In the late 80's the CERN institute in Geneva, Switzerland pioneered the internet in the scientific community and saw its user base among scientists and other enthusiasts grow exponentially in the years following. Today, the internet needs no introduction, almost everyone uses it now and it has become one of the most important means of global communication. The internet has evolved from a text and image-based environment to a full-blown medium for communication and entertainment, with live audio and video, real-time telephony and global access and coverage.
However, we're at the edge of a new, much more sophisticated networked computing revolution; the CERN institute has once again come up with a project that, once completed, will have even greater appeal to scientists and enthusiasts alike than the internet had a few decades ago.
The GriPhyN project, as it is called, is the first attempt to tackle the need for Petabyte-scale computing, such as is needed for the data- intensive science of the 21st century. The GriPhyN project is in essence a distributed network environment, and its workings show remarkable similarities to distributed computing projects such as SETI@home or even a networked environment such as Napster, the well-known Mp3 client, and subject of much controversy lately. GriPhyN will collect resources from universities, supercomputers, national labs, etc. to build one great virtual computer.
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