im very much into supercomputing and im doing reserch in supercomputing. what exactly are the supercomputing needs of the large hadron collider and how is it met right now? and if im not wrong, LHC will be upgraded into Super Large Hadron Collider (SLHC) like ten years down the line.. and i read somewhere that it will need a lot of supercomputing effort at that point in time.. can someone elaborate on this?

CERN is making use of 'The Grid', which is a high speed custom built fibre optic network between it and about a dozen large data centres in other academic institutions around the world, which then pipe data to hundreds of other research institutions via the internet.

The website for people directly involved in it is http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/ but the public info site is http://lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/public/. The LHC produces several gigabytes of data per second, all of which is sent to the dozen aforementioned global sites. They've already tested the grid network at 600Mb/s for 10 days in a row and I'd imagine that's now into the Gb/s range. The work involves in actually doing the analysis is then distributed by these institutions to different groups, who will do different kinds of analysis on it. There's, obviously, considerable computing power at CERN but its more cost efficient and also much more convenient to spread it around the many universities across the globe, all of whom have plenty of computing power which can be put to good use.

There's various false stories about how 'The Grid' will work in the future, it won't be some Bittorrent fat pipe for all your pirating needs, it'll be more about research instituitions being able to easily dial into one anothers massive computing resources in a much quicker and easier fashion. Just like your Google search request is routed through a bunch of computers without you needing to know or how Gmail or Hotmail keep your emails 'out there' in The Cloud and it's all seemlessly piped back to your PC by The Cloud, computing resources can be used in the same manner. God knows the amount of CPU cycles currently wasted by universities, whole computer labs just sit there whurring away, not doing anything.