Imagine a stack of CDs one mile high. Imagine the amount of data they could contain. And then devise a system which would handle information on that scale - known as a 'petabyte'.

A newly announced award of £389K under SHEFC's Joint Research Equipment Initiative (JREI) will enable scientists at the University of Glasgow Physics & Astronomy and Computing Science to develop the computing technology and infrastructure to handle this scale of task. They will be working jointly with scientists at the University of Edinburgh's Department of Physics & Astronomy and the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre who have received a JREI award of £425K.

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle smashing experiment located at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva) comes on stream in 2005 it will enable scientists to look further into the deep mysteries of the structure of matter and the origins and early evolution of the Universe.

However the LHC will generate about 1 petabyte of data per second from each of its four detectors. This enormous amount of data has to be reduced to about 1 petabyte per year before being made available for analysis by thousands of scientists spread across the globe.

Current computing technology does not scale to handle such extremely large data flow rates nor the complexity of the analysis process. The award won by the Glasgow and Edinburgh scientists will enable them to establish a prototype Scottish Computing Centre to develop the computing technology and infrastructure required to process, transport, store and mine this massive volume of data.

Dr Tony Doyle, the Principal Investigator at the University of Glasgow says: "The LHC data distribution and processing technology which will be developed will underpin research in other areas such as Astronomy, Computing Science, Genomics and Earth Observation, whilst providing generic technology and software for the government's wider e-science programme and the next generation Internet. A unique feature of the Scottish Centre will be the use of two sites, at Glasgow and Edinburgh, which will enable us to test many of the functions of a computational grid in a small-scale environment."

Media Relations Office (media@gla.ac.uk)

For further information contact:

Dr Tony Doyle: 0141 330 5899 a.doyle@physics.gla.ac.uk

or

University of Glasgow Press Office: 0141 330 3535

or

Anne McKelvie, University of Edinburgh Press Office: 0131 650 2248

First published: 19 December 2000