Global computer net set for Big Bang test

By FRANK JORDANS

Geneva

Sept. 8: When scientists fire up the biggest physics experiment in history this week they will face a task that makes finding a needle in a haystack look simple.

Inside a 27-km tunnel deep beneath the French-Swiss border they hope to detect evidence of extra dimensions, invisible "dark matter" and an elusive particle called the Higgs boson.

Success in this $10 billion endeavour would revolutionise our understanding of the universe.

But even the massive computing power at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research can’t sift through all the data that will pour in when its particle-smashing experiment begins on Wednesday.

So the Geneva-based lab, known by its old French acronym CERN, devised a way of sharing the burden among dozens of leading computing centres around the world.

The result is the "LHC Grid," a global network of 60,000 computers that will analyse what happens when protons are hurled at each other inside CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. "This is the next step after the Web," says David Colling, a scientist at Britain’s Imperial College. "Except that unlike the Web, you’re sharing computing power and not files."

That computing power is needed if scientists are to find what they are looking for among the mountains of data produced when four giant detectors, 10 times more accurate than any previous instruments, begin measuring activity at the subatomic level.

—AP