September 12, 2008

Data Deluge From Collider Prompts Next Big Information Revolution

By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

When the Large Hadron Collider revs up to full capacity near Geneva, it will generate about 15 million gigabytes of data each year — enough to fill a stack of DVDs more than two miles high.

So much information will be pouring out that it will equal about 1 percent of the total data produced each year throughout the world, says François Grey, head of communications for information technology at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory where the collider is