"The LHC is expected to produce about 15 petabytes of data every year for 10 to 15 years, enough to fill 3 million DVDs a year. If that data were burned to CDs, it would take a tower of CDs about 12 miles high to hold it, according to a CERN fact sheet, or more than twice as high as Mt. Everest.
"The grid relies on dedicated optical fiber networks to distribute data from CERN to 11 major computer centers in Europe, North America and Asia. From there, data is dispatched to more than 140 centers around the world, which provide the distributed computing power to process and manage the LHC data."
