wired has an interesting article titled 'the god particle and the grid' ( www.wired.com/wired/archi...04/grid.html ). it is about the search for the higgs boson particle at CERN. this particle supposed to be the smallest of the subatomic particles. to 'find' it they are constructing a large particle accelator at CERN, to be completed 2007.

this will generate an enormous amount of data, on the order of 10 petabytes (= 1024 terabytes or 1 million gigabytes) per year. as constructing a supercomputer for this task would be too costly, the plan is to link together existing supercomputers to form 'the grid.'

CERN web site: lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/

the software they are using is called globus: www.globus.org/