The 100,000-computer network especially designed by CERN, the world's largest particle physics lab and creator of the World Wide Web, to allow some 7,000 scientists in 33 counties to connect and share data and processing power on its huge experiments, was unveiled on Friday.

Known as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), it combines the power of more than 140 computer centers from 33 countries to analyze and manage more than 15 million gigabytes of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) data every year. With the huge amount of data to be analyzed and managed, the Computing Grid is "an absolute necessity," said Jos Engelen, chief scientific officer of the LHC project. Fifteen U.S. universities and three U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories contribute their power to the project.

"The U.S. has been an essential partner in the development of the vast distributed computing system that will allow 7,000 scientists around the world to analyze LHC data," said Glen Crawford of the High Energy Physics program in DOE's Office of Science.

"Particle physics projects such as the LHC have been a driving force for the development of worldwide computing grids," said Ed Seidel, director of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Office of Cyber infrastructure. "The benefits from these grids are now being reaped in areas as diverse as mathematical modeling and drug discovery."

All the information gathered from the LHC will be pumped out over special fiber optic networks to eleven "Tier One" computing facilities – one of which is Rutherford Appleton Labs in the UK. From there, the information is distributed further to another 140 labs around the globe.

"We can routinely process 250,000 jobs a day," said Ian Bird, leader of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project. "And we can achieve peaks of 500,000 jobs without problems." These jobs would take several days on a single processor, hence the need for the combined power of distributed computers.

The grid was due to start capturing and processing data from the LHC but live use has been delayed by a helium leak in the giant underground ring beneath Geneva that caused the experiment to be temporarily shut down on September 10. The repair isn't expected to be completed until November, when CERN's entire research infrastructure is shutdown for annual maintenance. It will restart in spring 2009.