The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid involves data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collisions at CERN to physics results. One such event includes 1.6 MB, that is a hell of a lot of data, explained Frank Linde. Therefore, the data has to be filtered and selected. We are talking of a speed of 500 MB/s here.

It is in the ATLAS experiment that the Grid comes in. The Tier 0 is located at CERN and 3500 CPUs are constantly cranking on this data. Furthermore, there are 11 Tier 1 sites involving 60 PB and 150.000 CPUs. The Netherlands has one of these Tier 1 sites which is supported by BiG Grid and housed at SARA and NIKHEF, Frank Linde told the audience. In addition, there are also 140 Tier 2 sites. The Netherlands has the second largest density thanks to SURFnet and BiG Grid.

The WLCG started in the nineties, with 10.000 CPUs in 2007 and 100.000 CPUs in 2009. In 2008 the Common Computing Readiness Challenge took place and in 2009 there was the Scale Testing Experiment Programme, called STEP'09.

The WLCG has to solve questions like 'What is the Universe made of?' and 'How does the Universe work?' The researchers are investigating the smallest building blocks of matter, following the track of the Big Bang towards the state of the Universe 14 billion years later. By letting particles collide the researchers try to understand the evolution in the Universe. Barely 4 percent of the building blocks in the Universe is known. The researchers study the dark matter and ask themselves where all the antimatter is. The Universe ought to be symmetric. Frank Linde noted that Einstein's e=mc2 is how it all works.

The particle accelerator in Geneva records the measurement of events. Scientists are in search of the Higgs particle. They watch the colliding proton beams at 2835 bunches per beam to try and find the new signatures out of an enormous amount of events.

For the Higgs particle research, Grid computing is needed and it already works. The number of users is increasing who are analyzing data on the Grid. The work amounts to 100.000 CPUs today. BiG Grid provides the Dutch Tier 1 to the LCG.

In 2010 the first "European" top-quarks have been observed. European scientists rediscovered a particle that was at that time only observed before in the United States. By 2015 they hope to discover the Higgs particle. This can be predicted because of the underlying theory. The observation of a mini-black hole will follow in the future hopefully. In 2025 a new accelerator will be built.

The principle is to start from an underlying theory, explained Frank Linde, and base observations on that theory. You cannot investigate things out of the blue because there is too much money involved. First scientists have to think about what they want to discover in reality. All things discovered which are not based on the theory should be considered as a bonus on top of that.