Scientists to fire up world's largest grid

British particle physicists are preparing to demonstrate what is believed to be the world's largest permanently working computing grid.

The UK is a major part of the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, providing more than 1,000 computers at 12 sites.

The grid has been designed to cope with the vast volume of data generated by experiments in the collider, currently under construction at Cern in Geneva, which will produce around 15 petabytes of data each year. A petabyte is approximately 1,000 terabytes.

GridPP, the UK's particle physics grid project, was set up by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council in 2000.

The project reached its halfway point on 1 September this year with the official end of its first phase and the start of GridPP2.

GridPP project manager Dr Dave Britton said in a statement: "The first half of the project aimed to create a prototype grid which we've done very successfully.

"Having proved that a grid can work, we're now focused on developing a large-scale, stable and easy-to-use grid integrated with other international projects.

"This will let scientists tackle problems that are much larger than those possible today."

By 2007, the grid will represent the equivalent of 100,000 of today's fastest computers working together to produce a virtual supercomputer which can be expanded and developed as needed.

When the Large Hadron Collider experiments start in 2007, they are expected to reveal new physics processes that were crucial in building the universe we see today, and may shed light on mysteries such as the origin of mass.

GridPP has developed a map that shows computing jobs moving around the grid in real time as they are distributed to the most suitable sites, run their programmes and then return their results home.

The map can be seen here.