BANGALORE, INDIA: The 35,000 crore experiment, the Large Hadron particle collider or Big Bang, which underwent on Wednesday September 10, 2008, is not just the biggest physics experiment in the world; it’s one of the biggest IT projects as well.

It is estimated that this experiment produces over 15 petabytes (A petabyte is a unit equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes) of data, which requires more than 60,000 computers to analyze it and two million DVDs to store.

The data will get sent via high-speed lines to 11 top research institutions in Europe, North America and Asia, and from there to a wider network of 150 facilities where the information will be studied by thousands of researchers.

Interestingly, 200 of the 2000 scientist working on this mammoth experiment are of Indian origin.

Some of the premium institutes in India like Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), Indore; Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai; Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay; Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata; Benares Hindu University and varsities of Delhi, Jaipur, Punjab and Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL), Hyderabad are working on this experiment and will also be involved in analyzing the data generated.

In fact, the ECIL researchers had engineered and supplied nearly 4,500 ‘Quench Heater Power Suppliers’, which were fitted along the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). ECIL also supplied about 75 ‘Breaker Electronics’, which were fitted to LHC.

India has contributed Rs. 100 crore to this project along with a bronze statue of 'Nataraja'.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its old French acronym CERN, has under taken this experiment to recreate conditions surrounding the Big Bang, which scientists believe gave birth to the universe.