Scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced on Friday via live video-link, together with their North American and Asian colleagues  that the massive computer grid, consisting of a total of 100,000 processors, and which is capable of processing the 15 petabytes of data outputted by the LHC each year, is online and ready for action.
Early during the development of the Large Hadron Collider, which is the biggest project of its kind ever undertaken, scientists realized that the sheer amount of data generated by its particle analyzers would be far greater than what any known computer network could handle. In fact, CERN’s IT department wasn’t even sure that Geneva’s power grid would be able to support such a huge data center if one was to be created. That’s why they opted for a different approach.
A number of dedicated fiber-optic lines with a bandwidth of 10 Gbit/s will go out of CERN and into 11 so-called ‘Tier-1’ data centers. These centers will do some of the processing required, but will also serve as the main archives for the LHC’s output. The Tier-1s will then send out the data to smaller, ‘Tier-2’ data centers all around the world, which are connected to them via public internet connections. These Tier-2s will actually do most of the processing.
There’s also an LHC@home project similar to ones such as SETI@home, which use a large number of personal computers as a grid, taking advantage of their idle processor time.
Unfortunately, with the setback the LHC is currently suffering, neither the main grid nor LHC@home have much to do right now, until spring when the particle accelerator will be back online.