CERN's LHC pioneers quantum leap in cloud computing  The Large
Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Centre for Nuclear
Research) in Geneva, which was switched back on on the 21
November following an electrical fault which saw the particle
collider switched off in September 2008, is designed to create
hundreds of millions of collisions between subatomic particles
every second, in an attempt to advance knowledge of energy and
matter, but most significantly to piece together the events
immediately after the big bang.  Four experiments spaced along
an underground tunnel the size of the London city line will
produce 15 petabytes of data per year, creating one of the
greatest challenges ever in the history of computing, requiring
that data be collected, formatted, stored, shared and secured on
a massive scale.  On site is a staggering concentration of
heavy-duty computing power, which includes 5,700 systems, 36,600
processing cores, 41,500 disk drives, 45,000 tape cartridges and
160 tape drives. But this only begi