Researchers from computationally intensive projects as wide-ranging as earthquake simulation, climate-change prediction and particle physics will have ten times faster access to a European supercomputing facility.
The Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which features 11 supercomputers dotted around Europe, has increased connectivity speeds to 10Gb/s, through Géant2, a network that connects 30 million students and researchers, from 34 countries across a distance of more than 50,000km, to the same resources.
The upgrade could not have come at a better time, with many new institutions cottoning on to the idea of using grid computing to increase the amount of computing resources available for their research. 23 projects have been planned for 2007, including Icaros for stratospheric ozone research, gyro3d to investigate plasma instability, and Helium to help explain radiation-matter interactions.
The network will provide the research groups with access to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, including the BSC in Spain, Idris in France and FZJ in Germany.