Grid
Physics
Network, pronounced
griffin, is a project
under development by
CERN with the goal to develop a
petascale distributed network which will be able to both store and process large quantities of information, and make it available to thousands of scientists all over the world.
Intended for use with data intensive projects such as:
The project is inaccurately described as
Napster for scientists, but it is more like a
Gnutella for scientists, featuring a highly decentralized design for both technical and strategic reasons and vast storing and processing capabilities.
One part of the network, funded by a $11.9 million grant from the NSF, will be deployed in the USA linking a number of universities.