GENEVA -- The way we use computing resources in areas ranging from fundamental research to medical diagnosis is about to be revolutionised. The European Particle Physics Laboratory, CERN, birthplace of the World Wide Web, today (September 29th 2003) announced the launch of its first computing Grid, covering twelve countries and three continents. Grids are a new way of employing computing power that should eventually have as big an impact on society as the web did, by allowing users to access world-wide distributed computing resources from their desktops as easily as local resources.

CERN's LHC computing Grid (LCG) is designed to handle the unprecedented quantities of data expected from a new experiment being constructed at CERN. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will probe the nature of matter by smashing protons together at high energies. The computational requirements of the LHC experiments are enormous - some 12-14 PetaBytes of data will be generated each year, the equivalent of more than 20 million CDs. Analysing this will require the equivalent of 70,000 of today's fastest PC computers. The goal of the LCG project is to meet these needs by deploying a persistent world-wide computational Grid service, integrating the resources of scientific computing centres spread across Europe, America and Asia into a global virtual computing resource.

"The Grid enables us to harness the power of scientific computing centres wherever they may be to provide the most powerful computing resource the world has to offer," said Les Robertson, LCG project manager at CERN.

The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) was the first partner to commit to this project and has provided substantial funding directly to CERN in addition to that spent within the UK research groups. Ian Halliday, PPARC Chief Executive said, "PPARC has strongly supported the LCG project both at CERN and in the United Kingdom. The technology now being deployed for particle physics will ultimately change the way that science and business are undertaken in the years to come. This will have a profound effect on the way society uses information technology, much as the World Wide Web did."

The first phase of LCG will operate a series of prototype services; gradually increasing in scale and complexity as our understanding of the functional and operational complexities involved in building a Grid of such unprecedented scale develops. LCG-1, the first of these prototype services, is being deployed now. By using 'middleware' developed mainly by the European Data Grid project and the Globus and related projects contributing to the Virtual Data Toolkit in the US, it allows physicists to access worldwide distributed computing resources from their desktops as if they were local.

The LCG-1 system determines what resources and data a job requires, arranges for the job to run anywhere in the world that can provide those resources, including locating and moving the data files required and produced by the job, and eventually returns the results to the physicist. This is the first step on the road towards deployment of the full-scale system that will be required for the LHC.

CERN The Datagrid Project Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)