Hadron Collider churns out 15 million Gigs of data a year

The LHC will produce this massive amount of data from the hundreds of millions of subatomic collisions expected inside the Collider every second - this stage marks an essential process in the discovery of new physics.

So, no rest for the researchers on this project then as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid uses the combined IT power of over 140 computer centres between 33 countries.

Ian Bird who leads the LHC project said, “Today’s result demonstrates the excellent and successful collaboration we have enjoyed with countries all over the world. Without these international partnerships, such an achievement would be impossible.”

Chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen explains that this project is the result of a "silent revolution" in large scale computing over the last five years or so.

The way all of this works is through dedicated fibre optic networks which distribute data from CERN to eleven different computer centres in Europe, Asia and North America - this data is then distributed to the 140 centres worldwide.

Bird said, “We can routinely process 250,000 jobs a day...and we can achieve peaks of 500,000 jobs without problems,” an estimated 100,000 processors are needed to handle these huge jobs.

The LHC project has received funding from agencies such as the European Commission in order to get this project to where it is today.

Von Rüden of CERN said of this financial help that, “These partnerships have contributed to the success of the grid,” and that it is very great full for this.

So - let the number crunching begin.

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