The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing - Jeane Baptiste Colbert
THREE WEEKS have passed since everyone stood by their clocks wandering if the Large Hadron Collider was going to finish this world off for good - since we all survived it's time for the boffins to begin collecting the 15 million plus Gigabytes of data to be produced every year.
The LHC will produce this massive amount of data from the hundreds of millions of subatomic collisions expected inside the Collider every second - this stage marks an essential process in the discovery of new physics.
So, no rest for the researchers on this project then as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid uses the combined IT power of over 140 computer centres between 33 countries.
Ian Bird who leads the LHC project said, “Today’s result demonstrates the excellent and successful collaboration we have enjoyed with countries all over the world. Without these international partnerships, such an achievement would be impossible.”
Chief scientific officer, Jos Engelen explains that this project is the result of a "silent revolution" in large scale computing over the last five years or so.
The way all of this works is through dedicated fibre optic networks which distribute data from CERN to eleven different computer centres in Europe, Asia and North America - this data is then distributed to the 140 centres worldwide.
Bird said, “We can routinely process 250,000 jobs a day...and we can achieve peaks of 500,000 jobs without problems,” an estimated 100,000 processors are needed to handle these huge jobs.
The LHC project has received funding from agencies such as the European Commission in order to get this project to where it is today.
Von Rüden of CERN said of this financial help that, “These partnerships have contributed to the success of the grid,” and that it is very grateful for this.
So - let the number crunching begin.µ
L'Inqs
You can watch the LHC Grid Fest live
here.
Interactions
Of course, Intel Xeons power the computational clusters at the LHC facility itself

http://www.intel.com/cd/business/enterprise/emea/eng/casestudies/396183.htm
...before they have hatched!

According to the nutters, it will destroy the known universe once they start smashing the protons together, and due to a major setback a couple of weeks ago, they are a couple of months behind schedule.

Stevie Hawkins reckons the universe won't implode around the French/Swiss border when they start smashing atoms together as the micro black holes created are supposed to only last nanoseconds in duration.
Man's technology has exceeded his grasp. - 'The World is not Enough'
September 24, 2008 - 'LHC on hold until spring of 2009' - PhysicsWorld.com: "The magnet failure last week at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) means that the accelerator will not be up and running again until early spring of 2009, say officials at CERN. To keep the project on schedule, the team running the accelerator near Geneva have decided to skip a planned test run at an intermediate energy and re-start the LHC in 2009 at the full beam energy of 7 TeV.") And begin creating Black Holes. 
Zealous, jealous, Nobel Prize hungry Physicists are racing each other and stopping at nothing to try to find the supposed 'Higgs Boson'(aka God) Particle, among others, and are risking nothing less than the annihilation of the Earth and all Life in endless experiments hoping to prove a theory when urgent tangible problems face the planet. The European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN) new Large Hadron Collider(LHC) is the world's most powerful atom smasher that will soon be firing groups of billions of heavy subatomic particles at each other at nearly the speed of light to create Miniature Big Bangs producing Micro Black Holes, Strangelets, AntiMatter and other potentially cataclysmic phenomena.
Particle physicists have run out of ideas and are at a dead end forcing them to take reckless chances with more and more powerful and costly machines to create new and never-seen-before, unstable and unknown matter while Astrophysicists, on the other hand, are advancing science and knowledge on a daily basis making new discoveries in these same areas by observing the universe, not experimenting with it and with your life.
The LHC is a dangerous gamble as CERN physicist Alvaro De Rújula in the BBC LHC documentary, 'The Six Billion Dollar Experiment', incredibly admits quote, "Will we find the Higgs particle at the LHC? That, of course, is the question. And the answer is, science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing." And CERN spokesmodel Brian Cox follows with this stunning quote, "the LHC is certainly, by far, the biggest jump into the unknown."
The CERN-LHC website Mainpage itself states: "There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions,..." Again, this is because they truly don't know what's going to happen. They are experimenting with forces they don't understand to obtain results they can't comprehend. If you think like most people do that 'They must know what they're doing' you could not be more wrong. Some people think similarly about medical Dr.s but consider this by way of comparison and example from JAMA: "A recent Institute of Medicine report quoted rates estimating that medical errors kill between 44,000 and 98,000 people a year in US hospitals." The second part of the CERN quote reads "...but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator,..." A molecularly changed or Black Hole consumed Lifeless World? The end of the quote reads "...as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe." These experiments to date have so far produced infinitely more questions than answers but there isn't a particle physicist alive who wouldn't gladly trade his life to glimpse the "God particle", and sacrifice the rest of us with him. Reason and common sense will tell you that the risks far outweigh any potential(as CERN physicists themselves say) benefits.
This quote from National Geographic, "The hunt for the God particle", exactly sums this "science" up: "If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That's the essence of experimental particle physics: "You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out." Read about the "other stuff" below:
http://www.SaneScience.org
http://www.risk-evaluation-forum.org/anon6.htm
http://www.LHCFacts.org/
http://www.LHCDefense.org/
http://www.LHCConcerns.com/
Popular Mechanics - "World's Biggest Science Project Aims to Unlock 'God Particle'" - http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/extreme_machines/4216588.html"
Nobody should start nibbling their fingers over this until at least spring of 09, when the LHC restarts. Can we at least have that gap of peace and quiet?

Here's the problem that the fearmongers don't quite seem to grasp; If they don't trust that the scientists are smart enough to know what they're creating is safe, they shouldn't trust that those scientists are smart enough to create the things the fearmongers are afraid of in the first place.
It amazes me how these "scientists" are trying to recreate life in a capsule as if we were made by mistake or a big bang .

if and when they destroy the earth they will have to answer to a GOD, no particles, no BS
Well I wonder how much of that will be repair data. They turned it on, likely just starting the air evacuation and cooling, and likely never truly fired it up. Now it is down because of a cooling leak and it will be down for half a year to repair. That does not sound good. This is a $10 BILLION paper weight. How much is this repair costing? How much data do they have? Will it even work? I can think of other things to spend $10 billion on, like battery technology and solar power.
so, can we expect to start folding some HC goodness anytime soon?
...it only churns out 15 petabytes a year.
Obsess much ?
-Ace Ventura

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia
...David Icke?
"Particle physicists have run out of ideas"

Says someone who, in saying exactly that, clearly has no blinking clue about the subject. The rest of their deluded rant suggests someone who once, when bored with their train set, decided to crash their trains together in one last attempt to get their parents to buy them some new toys, now projecting their clueless, foot-stamping experiences on the rest of the world as if everyone else cruises at the same non-intellectual altitude.

Rather than inventing tired old fictions about the supposed "Arrogance of Man" and mentioning "God" lots of times as if the word were about to be withdrawn from the language, all in a feeble attempt to pump up the "epic" nature of this fictional struggle playing out in your tiny little mind, why not get a hint of a glimpse of an education instead, moron?!
as ole Johnny Cash said once to a sad faced maiden

"Don't worry sugar... That black hole is coming down the highway"
Doubtful. First, they bragged it cost $14B, now that it's a bust, they say only $8B. I like how defensive their spokesperson got when Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes asked, "Why bother?" Spokesperson: "Wouldn't it be worth it to transport things (a la "Beam me up, Scotty"). Kroft asked, "Will you be able to do that?" Spokesperson: "I don't know, but I can't say we couldn't do that." Unbelievable. Word is they want to build another twice as big. Do they think we're stupid? Don't answer that.
15 million gigs eh, I trust they make a local copy for law enforcement to go over for evidence of terrorist chatting >:)