This week, UK particle physicists will demonstrate the world’s largest working computing Grid. With more than 6,000 computers at 78 sites internationally, the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG) is the first permanent, worldwide Grid for doing real science.

The Grid is designed to handle the expected 15 petabytes of data that will be produced each year by particle physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. By 2007, this Grid will have the equivalent of 100,000 of today’s fastest computers working together to produce a “virtual supercomputer.”