If the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t destroy the Earth, its data analysis network may give us faster porn.
Since the LHC will produce 56 million CD-ROMs worth of data annually, CERN scientists won’t use a central computer to analyze the data. Heck, they won’t even use distributed supercomputing over the Internet. They’ll use a custom grid of 55,000 servers in 11 data centers around the world hooked up via fiber optics and modern routers, free of the legacy copper crap that slows down the Internet. The grid features connections 10,000 times faster than typical broadband.
CERN is the birthplace of the Web; …read more

Only in high tech can you be sued for risking the end of the world.
The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.
Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe’s CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there’s no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they’re bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.
I say we switch it on …read more