Number-crunching Higgs boson: meet the world’s largest distributed computer grid

In an article which originally appeared on The Conversation, Dr Tom Whyntie explains how the world's largest distributed computer grid helped find the Higgs boson and what it'll be doing as the Large Hadron Collider is started up again. The world's largest science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, has potentially delivered one of physics' "Holy Grails" in the form of the Higgs boson. Much of the science came down to one number - 126, the Higgs boson's mass as measured in gigaelectronvolts. But this three-digit number rested upon something very much larger and more complicated: the more than 60,000 trillion bytes ( 60 petabytes ) of data produced by colliding subatomic particles in four years of experiments, and the enormous computer power needed to make sense of it all. There is no single supercomputer at CERN responsible for this task. Aside from anything else, the political faffing that would have ensued from having to decide where to build such a machine would have slowed scientific progress. The actual solution is technically, and politically, much more clever: a distributed computing grid spread across academic facilities around the world.