Since the first test firing of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) last month hasn't resulted in us being sucked into a myriad of black holes just yet, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid is ready to swing into action. Touted as the world's biggest grid computer, it will have the task of sifting through more than 15 million gigabytes (GB) - or 15 petabytes - of data every year, which will be produced from the hundreds of millions of subatomic collisions expected inside the LHC every second.The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid harnesses the data crunching power of more than 140 computer centres in 33 countries and boasts more than 100,000 processors beavering away to unlock the secrets of universe. "Our ability to manage data at this scale is the product of several years of intense testing," said Ian Bird, leader of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project. "We can routinely process 250,000 jobs a day and we can achieve peaks of 500,000 jobs without problems. A single job can be a calculation lasting several hours or even several days on a single high performance processor. An estimated 100,000 processors are needed to handle all jobs from the LHC experiments." I wonder if Blizzard could rent some of that power for its World Of Warcraft servers?-Martin Lynch [LHC] science technology