The Large Hadron Collider that has been put into production last September is expected to generate 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes, or 1.7 million dual-layered dvds) of data a year. That’s way beyond the point at which traditional methods of processing data are starting to fall apart. And it is by no means the only example of a problem that calls for non-traditional solutions.

In fact, many of these scalability challenges are also very real in developing some of the services TomTom provides. In this session, TomTom provided an overview of the challenges in delivering services such as IQ Routes, talked about the benefits grid solutions have to offer in that regard, and talked about the application of GridGain in an online route planner.

After that, Quintor dove deep into Hadoop, one of the other important Java-based open source grid computing solutions, and the predominant open source map-reduce implementation. Their talk included an overview on how to set it all up, and feature a live demonstration of using Hadoop for traffic simulations.