“The Grid,” the network of 100,000 computers designed to help the Large Hadron Collider unlock the mysteries of the universe, was declared ready for action yesterday.

Scientists believe that the Grid, described as a “worldwide revolution,” also has the capacity to find a cure for cancer and save lives following a natural disaster.

Excited researchers, from Vancouver to Beijing and Oxford to Melbourne, watched yesterday’s launch at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, through a live video link up.

It has been vaunted as the next evolution of the internet and may even allow researchers and pharmaceutical companies to find a cure for cancer faster than previously thought possible. This is because the Grid is able to crunch massive amounts of data very quickly by, in essence, turning a desktop PC into a supercomputer.

The Grid has already been used, but is now more powerful and has been declared ready to deal with the deluge of data that will come from the giant atom smasher when it fires up next spring.

"So far it works,” a nervous computer scientist at one of the Grid’s control centres said. “It worked when the first beams went around the LHC. It’s now ready for the real thing.”

At one point yesterday, the control centre’s screens showed that data was transferred between computers on the Grid at 15,000 Mbps, the equivalent of downloading a DVD in a fraction of a second. The Grid has the potential to crunch data even faster than that.

“Its been a long journey getting here,” said Les Robertson, the Scottish scientist and former Grid project leader, who many credit as the driving force behind its creation. “It opens the door to things that we couldn’t imagine doing before.”

Scientists at CERN, where the World Wide Web was invented, created the €500 million Grid because they realised that a single computer would not be able to cope with the huge amount of data the world’s largest machine is expected to produce.

Every year – the LHC will churn out 15 petabytes, or 15 million gigabytes, of information, which would fill 20 million CDs. If stacked together, the pile would be twice the size of Mount Everest.

From 33 countries around the world, physicists can now gain access to the raw data from the CERN’s experiments designed to find proof of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle. The Grid is designed to allow scientists to use the unemployed processing power of thousands of linked computers, to help deal with the information created by the LHC.

Many have described the Grid as the evolution of the internet. One CERN scientist explained that the internet was like a network of roads. The World Wide Web was then built to use that network to share information between computers. The Grid allows users not only to share information through the internet, but to share computing power as well.

Yesterday, Jim Virdee, a CERN scientist, said that once the LHC’s experiments start in earnest next year, the earliest they will have data that could help them to prove the existence of the Higgs is “two or three years away, if nature is kind to us”. More likely is that the LHC’s experiments will keep the Grid busy for many years to come.

In the meantime, the network of computers will be put to good use. It is already improving our chances of finding cures for new strains of diseases such as bird flu within weeks, rather than months or years.

Previously, scientists would look for cures by mixing various drugs in the lab and seeing how they work. Now, with the Grid, they can run hundreds of thousands of simulations to create a shortlist of the drugs that are most likely to offer the potential for a cure. Researchers can then get to work testing the drugs singled out as promising.

The Grid is also being used to save lives in the immediate aftermath of earthquakes. Using the seismic data, scientists can use it for simulations that pinpoint which areas are most affected, allowing rescue teams to direct their efforts where they are most needed. Similarly, the Grid can help work out what parts of an area is worst hit following a hurricane or a flood, which could help to save thousands of lives.

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