The proposed lightningfast replacement for the internet will consume a lot of power.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: "We need so much processing power there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers... The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries."

That network, effectively a parallel internet, is now built, using dedicated fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres around the world, including those in the US, Canada, east Asia and Europe. From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.

Ian Bird, project leader for Cern's high-speed computing project, said grid technology would make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.

"It will lead to what's known as `cloud computing' where people keep all their data online and access them from anywhere," he said.

Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed, as well as receive them. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded "frozen screen" experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.

The real aim of the grid is, however, to work with LHC in tracking down nature's most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass. LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle -- but even at its best will generate data on only a few thousand of the particles each year. It is such a large statistical task that the work will keep even the grid's huge capacity fully occupied for years to come.

However, although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films.

In theory, this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.

Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers, including astronomers and molecular biologists. It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria which kills one million people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyze 140m compounds -- a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.