Worldwide LHC Computing Grid

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), formerly (until 2006) the LHC Computing Grid (LCG), is an international collaborative project that consists of a grid-based computer network infrastructure incorporating over 170 computing centers in 36 countries, as of 2012. It was designed by CERN to handle the prodigious volume of data produced by Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments.

By 2012, data from over 300 trillion (3×10¹⁴) LHC proton-proton collisions had been analyzed, and LHC collision data was being produced at approximately 25 petabytes per year. As of 2012, The LHC Computing Grid had become the world's largest computing grid comprising over 170 computing facilities in a worldwide network across 36 countries.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was designed to prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson, an important but elusive piece of knowledge that had been sought by particle physicists for over 40 years. A very powerful particle accelerator was needed, because Higgs bosons might not be seen in lower energy experiments, and because vast numbers of collisions would need to be studied. Such a collider would also produce unprecedented quantities of collision data requiring analysis. Therefore, advanced computing facilities were needed to process the data.

A design report was published in 2005. It was announced to be ready for data on 3 October 2008. A popular 2008 press article predicted "the internet could soon be made obsolete" by its technology. CERN had to publish its own articles trying to clear up the confusion. It incorporates both private fiber optic cable links and existing high-speed portions of the public Internet. At the end of 2010, the Grid consisted of some 200,000 processing cores and 150 petabytes of disk space, distributed across 34 countries.

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