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Photos: The Cern computers cracking the Big Bang
Inside the IT hub that powers the Large Hadron Collider...

By Nick Heath

Published: Monday 06 October 2008

The Cern Computer Centre in Geneva, seen here, is the number-crunching hub that powers the physics research lab's quest to discover the nature of the universe.

A formidable 8,000 servers housing 40,000 Intel processor cores provide the grunt to help crack the petabytes of data spewed out from Cern's cutting-edge particle accelerators, based in Geneva, Switzerland.

About half of these cores will be used to deal with data from the 27km-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will generate about 15 petabytes of data by colliding protons with protons.

The computer centre will only provide about 20 per cent of the processing power used to examine the LHC data, with the rest coming from the LHC Computing Grid, a dedicated network of more than 100,000 processors.

Scientists hope the LHC will offer a "glimpse" at the Higgs Boson, a particle thought to give mass to the universe.

Photo credit: Cern