Congratulations CERN. As if inventing the internet and making the biggest machine ever wasn't good enough, they've got more tricks up their sleeve, more candy in their pinata... You get the picture.
The grid was designed to meet the data processing needs of the Large Hadron Collider (which, it is estimated, will produce a staggering 15 petabytes - 20 million CDs worth of data-y goodness.) It is a network that makes use of the processing power of computers in 33 countries, and at the moment is reserved for CERN and similarly large projects. But, like all the best science, it will make our day to day lives better in the future when put to wider use. We'll be able to download more than we could ever watch/listen to/touch ourselves to, and we'll all be making video calls as cheaply and easily as "the 1950s" thought we would be by 2000.
So not only do we have a nifty (understatement!) piece of technology, they've given it a great name. Internet was pretty damn good; catchy and instant, yet suitably geeky sounding, and now they present us with "The Grid". It's a perfect example of sci-fi becoming reality.
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