IT hopes to unravel mysteries of time

14:07 8th August 2008

The world's largest IT grid started work today (August 8th), as scientists hope to use information technology to help solve the mysteries of creation.

The £7 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva will begin hurling protons and capturing data on conditions that occured at the birth of the universe.

Computing power, needed to sort and store this information, will be provided by the LHC Computing Grid (LCG), which compromises 200,000 processors, in 11 academic institutions around the world, connected by optical fibre links.

This IT grid will contain at least five million gigabytes of disk storage and 16 million gigabytes of tape storage, which is expected to handle between 12 and 14 petabytes of data each year.

The first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on October 21st.

When activated, scientists hope that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observations of which could confirm how elementary particles acquire mass and confirm the missing link in the standard model of physics.

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