UK scientists express joy at LHC switch-on

One of the most important technological advances to come out of Cern's work has been its contributions to grid computing, which involves using large numbers of loosely coupled computers over a great area to share the load of handling large amounts of data. Such distributed methods are necessary for analysing the anticipated 15 petabytes of data that are expected to come out of the LHC every year.

Imense is one company that has benefited from the UK's part of the greater grid, GridPP. A spin-off from Cambridge University, Imense has used the technology to develop its content-based image search systems, which they hope will catch on as a way to find images based on keywords, even from unannotated photographs. The company was helped in this by the STFC, which granted them use of one percent of GridPP.

Two representatives from the company were at Wednesday's event. Dr Chris Town (left) described the LHC initiation as "exciting", noting that all sorts of non-physics applications are possible on the grid. Dr David Sinclair (right) added that projects such as the LHC "generate people with the skillset we [in companies such as Imense] need."