The Real Time Monitor
About the grid
The Grid is a globally distributed computer system. It connects computers all across the world and gives researchers from many discplines access to these resources. Once a user has submitted their task to the Grid it distributes the work to suitable and available resources. This means that scientists in Taiwan have access to and could be using resources in France, Australia and China among others. The Real Time Monitor is a visualisation of this system at work and in real time.
Grid development was originally driven by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In 2009 the LHC was turned on in Switzerland and it is the world's largest particle accelerator. To cope with the huge amount of information the LHC generates it needs massive computing power. To solve this problem the Grid was created to provide this computing power.
Developed by the High Energy Physics group at Imperial College London, the Real Time Monitor gathers information from various sources across the Grid world. This data means the application can monitor and display the Grid working in near real time. Imperial College London is one of the institutes which makes up GridPP, a collaboration of particle physicists building the UK's contribution to the Grid.
For more information on GridPP and the Grid visit the Introduction to The Grid & GridPP page.
