If you have created the world’s biggest science experiment, you are going to need a rather large computer to analyse your findings.

The 7,000 researchers who will all be studying data from the Large Hadron Collider experiment in Geneva have very complex questions to answer.

But going about answering them is no easy task, given that the researchers are spread across 33 different countries around the world, from Beijing to Barcelona. The sheer amount of data thrown up from the experiment means it will have to be stored in different places around the world.

“In order to do the analysis of the Large Hadron Collider you need the resources of all the countries involved in the LHC," Ian Bird, LHC Computing Project Leader, told FRANCE 24. One way to do this is to build a big computing centre and put everything in it…but this is not physically possible.”

CERN’s solution is the LHC Grid, a way of linking up computers via the internet, to create a virtual supercomputer that’s much more powerful than separate units.

Let’s not forget how huge the task at hand is. CERN is looking for one hundred “interesting” particle collisions out of the 40 million that will be happening each second. There are thousands of computers on site, but not enough to digest everything.

Sharing the information between different sites means storage is less of a problem, there are more resources for processing and scientists can access all the information, no matter where its stored, from inside the Grid.
 

“I as a physicist can sit at my laptop, send work to the Grid and not need to know physically where a piece of work is running,” said Ian Bird. “It could run in China, it could run in France, or in the US, and then it comes back to me and all that is done behind the scenes. The Grid is the software which makes that happen.”

Grid technology is already changing the way we work and live, such as in the Health-E Child project, funded by the European Union.

 
“The grid is for us a sort of technological glue,” explains David Manset from Health-E Child. “We link up hospitals around Europe with this technology, in order to enable doctors to share anonymous patient data online.”

The goal is to give doctors a wider sample before they take medical decisions – particularly useful for rare conditions. Hospitals would normally hold on to their own data, so this could help doctors spot trends.
 

The last time CERN got behind a technology to help scientists work together it caught on in a big way, turning into the World Wide Web. Who knows, they say, GRID computing may one day play just as big a role in our lives.