Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
By installing the Folding@home
screen saver program on their
personal computers, more than
1 million people around the world
contribute their idle CPU time to
research diseases such as
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and many
forms of cancer.
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computing and massively parallel computing. For example, University of Washington stu-
dents use the Google cluster to scan millions of changes made to the online encyclopedia
that provides users with a highly expandable computing capacity for Web site development
the delivery of applications for businesses and consumers. Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt has
stated that “Most people who run small businesses would like to throw out their infrastruc-
ture and use ours for $50 per year.” Several
Fortune
1000 companies are running Google
Apps pilots to test the concept of running their applications on the world's most efficient
supercomputer—the Google cloud computer. Companies are asking whether Google, IBM,
Amazon.com, or others can provide a cheaper, more reliable, more secure, more flexible, and
more powerful alternative through cloud computing. Would effective cloud computing
encourage companies to abandon large components of their IT infrastructure?
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Driven by factors such as needing to retain more data longer to meet government regulatory
concerns, store new forms of digital data such as audio and video, and keep systems running
under the onslaught of increasing volumes of e-mail, the amount of data that companies store
digitally is increasing at a rate of close to 100 percent per year. As an extreme example, the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located near Geneva, Switzerland, will be the world's largest
and highest-energy particle accelerator when it becomes operational mid-2008. The LHC is
an essential tool of physicists in their search for a Grand Unified Theory that would unify
three of the four fundamental forces of the universe: electromagnetism, the strong force, and
the weak force. Proving this theory would also explain why the remaining force, gravitation,
is so weak compared to the other three forces. The LHC project is expected to produce
15 petabytes of data each year.
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Storing data safely and effectively is critical to an organization's success. Recognizing this,
Wal-Mart operates one of the largest collections of customer data in the world to hold data
from 800 million transactions generated by its 30 million customers each day. The amount
of data stored is about 1 petabyte and is used to analyze in-store sales to determine the ideal
mix of items and the optimal placement of products within each store to maximize sales.
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