University computer cluster boosts Cern research
A new computer cluster has been unveiled by Queen Mary, University of London that will link to a 100,000 processor grid in the UK and around the world. The projects that will be researched include a cure for malaria and the international research effort into the nature of matter, spearheaded by Cern.
The project at Queen Mary is backed by Sir Alan Sugar, the chairman of Viglen. Sir Alan, the technology entrepreneur who founded Amstrad, unveiled the cluster at the college's Mile End campus on Friday.
The grid under development will have a number of purposes, including the analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, which opens at Cern in Switzerland later this year.
The particle physicists and computer scientists organising these clusters in the UK are part of the Grid Particle Physics (GridPP) project. The GridPP has been adapted at times for different high-performance computing tasks, including the search last year for a cure for bird flu, which underlines the flexibility of the grid architecture.
Sir Alan took time out at Friday's announcement to show that there was more to him than his TV image of the boss who likes to fire people on the BBC programme The Apprentice. "My staff and I continue to work hard to be at the cutting edge of industry," he said. "The development of this computer at Queen Mary, University of London, will hopefully enable major scientific breakthroughs in years to come."
The Department of Physics at Queen Mary has partnered with Cern, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, and academic institutions worldwide to investigate the fundamental properties of matter.
Queen Mary is involved with the Atlas experiment, a cathedral-sized detector that will produce petabytes of data in its search for the secrets of the universe, requiring a large-scale array of high-performance processors, and necessitating that Queen Mary selects a partner to assist in the development of its computing cluster.