Introduction to information systems T. Cornford, M. Shaikh is1 060 2013

Data centres, enterprise servers and mainframes: A data centre 
is a large central computing resource for running programs and storing 
data. Big companies that operate across the world may have just a few 
such centres to service most of their corporate (enterprise) computing 
needs. ‘Mainframe’ is an older term to designate large general-purpose 
computers. Such machines were long the basis for large, centralised data-
processing operations; the name mainframe has been used for at least 50 
years. In practice today such a major computer resource would be made 

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IS1060 Introduction to information systems
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up of a number of computers all working in parallel and sharing a set 
of data storage devices – disks mostly. An example today would be the 
computers of a bank, which handle customer accounts, or of a government 
department supporting operations such as the issuing of passports, 
driving licences or paying people’s pensions. In each case some of the 
‘transactions’ supported might be done online and directly by a customer 
or citizen – probably via the internet and a website or perhaps from their 
phone (see Figure 5.2 in Laudon and Laudon, 2013).
Supercomputers: These are machines built to undertake high-speed 
computations that may involve vast amounts of data. They are used, 
for example, for performing engineering and scientific calculations. An 
example of a use for a supercomputer would be weather forecasting.
Data centres and supercomputers are for high-volume applications with 
extensive data storage requirements. They generally require special 
buildings with air-conditioning and cooling systems to keep the computers 
and storage devices running. One modern example of a supercomputing 
facility is a GRID. For example, the computing facility that supports the 
big CERN physics laboratory in Switzerland and in particular the Large 
Hadron Collider (LHC) where the Higgs boson has been detected, is 
known as the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) http://public.web.cern.ch. This 
GRID includes computers in over 100 sites across the world, including 
about 20 major data centres in different countries, all connected by 
networks and operating together to share out the work.
The way that CERN explains their GRID on their website is as follows:
The grid is based on the same idea as the Web, which was 
invented at CERN in the beginning of the 90s: sharing resources 
between geographically distributed computers. But whereas the 
Web simply shares information on the computers, the Grid also 
shares computing power and storage capacity. This means that 
scientists can log on to the Grid from their PC, and the work 
they need to be done will be carried out by many machines 
across the planet. This allows scientists to carry out very complex 
calculations quickly and simply. (http://public.web.cern.ch/
public/en/spotlight/SpotlightGrid-en.html)