How many physicists does it take...?

30 May 2001

It is just over ten years since the first web site was set up on a computer at CERN, the European laboratory for research in particle physics, near Geneva. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the World Wide Web has revolutionised communications - at the click of a mouse we can book holidays, buy stocks and shares, choose new clothes . The original proposal was aimed at helping particle physicists around the world communicate more easily. Now particle physicists are preparing for another big step forward - world-wide distributed computing via a "World Wide Grid". The dream is that users can access computing power around the world as readily as we access electricity via the electrical power grid. This is of particular interest to particle physicists who face the challenge of processing increasingly vast amounts of data from new experiments - in only one second experiments at CERN's future Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will record as much data as 10,000 editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica! This picture shows the team involved in GridPP, a collaboration of UK particle physicists working to provide the UK part of a Grid for distributed computing for experiments such as BaBar (at SLAC), CDF and D0 (at Fermilab) as well as those at the LHC. Other related projects include the European DataGrid, the US Particle Physics Data Grid and the US Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN)

Credit: J.Gordon, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Please contact person or institution named for information about permission for public or commercial use.