Discovery Mondays - The Web of the future: a calculator for the planet

Physics is hungry for bytes. The LHC experiments will produce 10 petabytes (a 1 followed by 16 zeros) each year, enough to fill 16 million CD-ROMs. CERN is introducing some futuristic computing tools to process, manage and store this phenomenal flow of data. The most spectacular among them is without doubt the Grid, a development of the Web, which will make it possible to pool the computing resources of thousands of computers distributed around the world. The next Discovery Monday will offer you a glimpse into how this super computer works. Come and watch demonstrations of the Grid in action for such projects as UNOSAT, which gathers geographic data by satellite. Become one of the first users of the Grid by sending a job.
In the course of the evening another cutting-edge tool will be unveiled. EDMS is a system which enables some 6000 scientists from around the world to communicate and track in real time all the technical documentation on the million-odd components for the LHC and its experiments.
You will realise the great step forward these achievements represent since the days of the first experiments at CERN. The extent of technological progress has been incredible, from the days of the first storage disks to the world of the Web, the amazing tool invented at CERN at the beginning of the 90s for the small particle physics community, and which has now become an indispensable part of life throughout the world.