The city will have a connection to the next instalment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment underway in Europe, with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in the city housing a computer that is part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), the system that will allow scientists to understand and analyse the data from the experiment.

The LHC experiment, which made waves around the world last month, will require scientists to analyse large amounts of data from each aspect of the experiment, and the WLCG, which became functional last week, will be used for this. The grid technology, as it is called, has immense computing power and data storage capability, and is distributed in three tiers around the globe.

Tier 0, the central and uppermost level, is located in Geneva, Switzerland at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research's (CERN), the headquarters of the experiment, and will receive raw data. "One set of countries have tier 1, whereas the rest have tier 2 systems. In India, Mumbai's Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre, Kolkata, have tier 2 systems," says Nagaraj Panyam, one of the system administrators for the tier 2 system at TIFR in Mumbai.

The Baba Atomic Research Centre (BARC), too, has contributed to the software used in the grid technology. "BARC's contribution has been towards making software tools, problem-solving tools, and monitoring tools. The main aim is to see that smooth operations go on, since it is a wide network of countries from over the world. Around 25-30 people were involved in the work, which lasted over 15 months," says G P Srivastava, director of Electronics and Instrumentation at BARC, which is connected with computer activities. The tier 2 system has approximately 2,000 times the computing power compared to a typical desktop.

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