A recent article on the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) global project suggests that there are spill-over innovation benefits on highly complex global projects. The LHC project involves scientists and technicians from around the world in the creation of the world's largest scientific instrument to "probe deeper into matter than ever before". It has suffered from the unfortunate delays associated with many global projects, however, there appears to be an 'innovation' silver lining.

The article, "Global Grid service for LHC computing succeeds in gigabyte-per-second challenge," describes the challenges associated with the establishment of a "global Grid service for real-time storage, distribution and analysis" of data collected in the LHC project. The most recent challenge on the project was to sustain a continuous flow of data on a worldwide grid infrastructure at up to 1 gigabyte per second. In February, they successfully achieved this across 12 major computing centers around the globe (including centers in Taipei, the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands, UK, and Canada).

According to Kors Bors, Grid Deployment Chairman of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid organization, "the challenge involved interoperation between four different mass storage system technologies and required a big technical push." As a result of this technological push, Bob Jones, the project director of Enabling Grids for E-SciencE, commented that "The significance of these results goes well beyond the immediate needs of the high energy physics community. What has been achieved here is nothing less than a breakthrough for scientific Grid computing. The lessons learned from this experience will surely benefit other scientific domains such as biomedicine, nanotechnology and environmental sciences in their future use of Grids."

The challenges of global projects can create delays, contribute additional costs, and potentially negatively impact quality. However, in some cases, the challenges of global projects can necessitate advances in technology that create innovation spill-overs within the project's domain and across other domains. The advances in Grid computing are clearly one example of an innovation spill-over. Another well-publicized innovation spill-over from CERN is the birth of HTML (hyper-text markup language) and with it the World Wide Web.

Posted by jetaylor at May 2, 2006 2:23 AM