Today, the European Commission, together with the Gridstart and Nextgrid projects, will launch all IST Grid projects chosen under the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) for research and technological development. Scientists, who met recently in the UK to discuss the merits of virtual science, were treated to a live demonstration of the Grid by their particle physics colleagues. It sounds like science-fiction, but the Grid is simply a powerful computing network which pools available memory and power from computers located anywhere in the world using virtual systems. It solves big problems that no single computer or local network could cope with. Problems like those related to particle physics. At the heart of Grid computing, say experts, is a computing infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive and inexpensive access to computational capabilities. Researchers working to solve many of the most difficult scientific problems have long understood the potential of such shared distributed computing systems. The European Union has also shared in this vision, by backing projects under its Information Society Technologies (IST) research programme. The rationale for this is that research infrastructures like the particle physics Grid or the education network ‘Geant’ help the Union achieve its ERA ambitions. The key to this is, through ‘cross-fertilisation’ and ‘optimisation’ of research efforts, scientists across Europe are able to communicate more effectively and, where possible, to find areas where synergies can be exploited. All hands on deck Delegates at the ‘UK All Hands e-Science Meeting’, held earlier this month, saw the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid in action. This project, set up by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), consists of over 6 000 computers located at 78 sites internationally. And it needs every bit of this memory capacity, and more, because the particle physics experiments to be conducted at CERN’s LHC in Switzerland will produce around 15 Petabytes – 5 million billion bytes – of data each year. To deal with this huge volume of information, physicists worldwide have spent the last two years building their prized Grid. With each successive year, it will grow in power, according to its creators. And, by 2007, when the LHC experiments are expected to start, the Grid will be the equivalent of 100 000 of today’s fastest computers working together to produce a ‘virtual supercomputer’, which can be expanded and developed as needed. With all this power, new physics processes crucial to our understanding of the Universe and the origins of mass could all be revealed. Professor Tony Doyle, leader of the consortium which developed the Grid, says their achievements will provide a boon to particle physicists and e-Science, in general. “We now have a true international working Grid, running more than 5 000 computing jobs at a time. Our next aim is to scale up the computing power available by a factor of ten, so that we’ll have 10 000 computers in the UK alone, ready for the LHC in 2007.”