Photos: The super-brain behind the particle smasher

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is switched on this November it will be the world's most powerful particle accelerator, churning out roughly 15 million gigabytes of experimental data every year.

To make sense of all this information, Cern - the European centre for particle physics near Geneva which is building the collider – has put together a global grid to make sure the data is accessible to the 5,000 scientists around the world wanting a piece of the atom-smashing action.

The LHC is a 27km circular tunnel that straddles the border of France and Switzerland 100 metres underground - pictured is an aerial view of the collider's location.

The LHC is currently testing its grid infrastructure using simulated data which gets pumped out from the main centre to the 11 tier-one data centres where it will eventually be stored.

Francois Grey, head of the IT communications team at Cern, told silicon.com: "The data will come out at a phenomenal rate, every 25 nanoseconds there will be two bunches of protons colliding in the detector."

Photo credit: Cern