The Grid

Seems like the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at Cern will go online. To process the amount of data they will collect for finding out what really happened at the time of the big bang, they need a new kind of computer. Welcome “The Grid”. What they do is connect the computer in research centres world wide to allow them to analyse the 20 million CDs of data likely to be collected each year. “This will have a profound effect on the way society uses information technology, much as the worldwide web did.” BBC NEWS | Technology | Huge computing power goes online

Of course we already had something similar with Seti@Home, where computers donated their computing power to find aliens in outer space, but The Grid is a lot bigger in terms of computing power it can tab into and if I understand it correctly they will make these machines one big computer, not allow each one of them to crunch a little bit of data on their own.