Inside Cern's atom-smasher number-cruncher

The main cluster of 20,000 disks in the computer centre runs on a modified version of Red Hat Linux. There are 8,000 servers in the room, with 16,000 processors and almost 40,000 cores. These are linked using HP ProCurve switches that handle 4.8 Tbps (terabits of data per second).

The computer centre will be used to process data from the LHC, a machine built to try to mimic conditions just after the Big Bang. The machines will produce head-on collisions between two beams of particles of the same kind, either protons or lead ions. The resulting data will then be studied, to try to gain understanding of questions such as the nature of dark matter and the origins of mass.