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UK particle physicists are building a computing Grid, to analyse the data deluge from CERN's next particle accelerator. Over the next three years, this will be scaled up and integrated further with other Grids worldwide, to produce the world's first persistent, international, production Grid. The GridPP project is the UK's contribution to analysing this data. It is a six-year, £33m project, funded by PPARC as part of its e-Science Programme.

GridPP began in 2001 and has been working in three main areas: application development (for example Gaudi and AtheNa Grid Alliance (GANGA) http://cern.ch/ganga/, a front-end for job definition and management in a distributed environment); middleware development (e.g. LCG, and more recently LCG2 http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/, preparing the computing environment for the analysis of data generated at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)); and deployment.

The UK is making substantial contributions to worldwide preparations for the analysis of LHC data. This work involves simulation, data mining and visualisation, with each LHC experiment carrying out a series of data challenges to prepare for the analysis of real collision data. Together with other universities, Birmingham is a partner of the Southern virtual Tier 2 (Website: http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/southgrid/) - a powerful combined computing facility for analysing LHC data.