CERN’s Large Hadron Supercollider will begin generating more than 10 million gigabytes of data each year when it becomes operational in 2006 — beyond the capabilities of any computer CERN scientists had at their disposal, or any supercomputer that could be built. The solution: the European DataGrid.The European DataGrid is an ambitious project based on an emerging distributed-processing technology known as grid computing. Instead of relying on mainframe makers like IBM to produce ever more powerful boxes, grid computing lets scientists achieve the same effect by combining the computational power of separate machines — in this case, several thousand machines.