lives in just a few years. We now all talk to ead\ other, find out information. shop and bank through the informal. global net\Wrk of computers, using a system of software called the World WIde Web. Yet the Web was first purely a physicist's
tool - developed at CERN,
the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva, to allow
its researdl teams based
across different countries to communicate and share data.
Now, physicists and computer scientists are driving the next evolutionary stage in Internet
The Grid will playa major role in analysing paTticle
collisions from the
Large Hadron Collider

ted1nology, whidl is to broaden the capability of computer networks to provide delocalised. large-scale resources for storing. accessing and processing OOta, and to make them avauableto groups of people with common goals. Computer services will become a utility like electricity, supplied via a 'Grid' that you can simply plug into without being concerned about their location.
The first beneficiaries will be large collaborations of scientists
Developing new aircraft will be done by 'virtual' organisations supported by the Grid

and engineer$ ~ng on problems that involve huge amounts of data. Indeed. one
of the first large-scale examples of the Grid in action will be in high-energy physics. The Large Hadron CoIlider, being built at CERN to i~stigate the ultimate physics of the Universe. will generate billions of megabytes of data to be made available
for analysis to thousands of physicists .....orKing in teams around the ~rld. No supercomputer could manage this amount of data on its own. The LHC Grid will therefore be spread over an international netwm of sites in a fouf-tier system.
Other scientific areas dealing with deluges of data. will also benefit from this distributed computing approadl. These include astronomy. Earth observation. engineering and
the biosciences (in particular exploiting the information from
the Human Genome
project). In fact. the Grid
makes possible a powerful and pervasive researdl methodology - 'e-science'.
Idle computers
The idea of distributed computing is quite old. Even 20 years ago, people realised that individual computers could be harnessed like a team of horses to provide more processing power. Today, the fastest supercomputers are collections of microprocessors, and many laboratories string together clusters of PCs - ead1 more powerful than a supercomputer was 10 years ago - into computer 'farms'.
However, there is no reason why the PCs should be in one location or even in one country. This was realised in 1985 by Miron Livny at the University of
THANKS GO TO TONY HEY OF SOUTHAMPTON UNIVERSITYjEPSRCjDTI, AND AlSO TO GERRY