Lily Asquith: The world wide web was famously invented at Cern to help international collaborators share information. The Grid is there to help them share computing power, too

I have recently been "submitting to The Grid". This is not some kind of freaky S&M thing, disappointingly perhaps to some. It is a process we have to go through in order to analyse the data being collected by the Atlas detector at Cern.

The Atlas experiment has approximately a zillion (2,000) people working on it. (My new town declares itself to have 11,000 people but I have not noticed any update to this since we moved here.)

It is burbling out data in vast quantities. We can't catch it all because we would then have to store it somewhere, and it is currently producing terabytes of data per second*. Mental. So we just catch and store some of it. About 100 megabytes per second.

Every single physicist working on Atlas wants to get their hands on that data. But making copies of 26 terabytes of data every day would be ridiculous. Especially as most of it is junk to most people.

That's why we have The Grid. The burbling mass of mainly-junk-data is collected and stored and copied to just a few locations around the world. We don't copy anything to our laptops, instead we write a bit of analysis code, something like "Please give me all the events that look like a giant web made by a spider that has been given caffeine pills. And it has to have at least one mummified ant in it, and it has to have a diameter of 6.5-7.5 cm."Then we send this request to The Grid. A bit like sending a letter to Santa (you have no idea where it is going and you can be fairly sure you won't hear anything back). However, being a good girl does not help. Phew.

I feel reluctant to be publicly rude about The Grid, but am happy to hurl all sorts of abuse at It in the privacy of my own office. Or on the bench on my porch, which is where I am writing this because I don't have a chair yet. Or a kettle. These things are way down the "to do" list, which became a bit crumpled and forgotten once I achieved the first four points: school, house, inflatable mattress, wi-fi.

We have to use The Grid because (a) most people have no other option and (b) it will never work if we don't use it and report problems.

So when my next job fails with a beautifully opaque error code (most recent one: "Lost heartbeat") I take comfort in knowing that thousands of physicists around the world are sending letters to Santa and sitting there with a cup of tea (or a crate of Guinness, or a sack of Haribo) just waiting for their letter to come back with a sticker on it saying "Nope" and humbly hoping that it won't be too long. And just maybe one day they will get a postcard from the north pole.

*At some point in the future the LHC will undertake a large increase in luminosity. This means that the bunches of protons it will be colliding will have more protons in them, so there will be lots more collisions between the protons and lots more data. The amount of data produced at peak luminosity will be about 1 petabyte per second. That is 1,000 terabytes.