As described on the organization's website, CERN is "the world's largest particle physics centre. Here physicists come to explore what matter is made of and what forces hold it together. CERN exists primarily to provide them with the necessary tools. These are accelerators, which accelerate particles to almost the speed of light and detectors to make the particles visible."

20 European Member States

The CERN website indicates that "the Council is the highest authority and has the ultimate responsibility for all important decisions. It controls CERN's activities in scientific, technical and administrative matters....

"The Council is ultimately responsible for all important decisions; it determines CERN's policy in scientific, technical and administrative matters, approves the programmes of activities and adopts the budgets, it also reviews expenditure.

"Each Member State has two official delegates, one representing his or her government's administration and the other national scientific interests. Each Member State has a single vote and most decisions require a simple majority, although in practice the Council aims for a consensus as close as possible to unanimity."

CERN touts itself as the place "where the World Wide Web was born" (invented and developed by Tim Berners-Lee and a small CERN team 1989-1994).

Today CERN hosts one of the most ambitious "grid computing" projects in the world. As explained on CERN's GridCafe website: "Whereas the Web is a service for sharing information over the Internet, the Grid is a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the Internet. The Grid goes well beyond simple communication between computers, and aims ultimately to turn the global network of computers into one vast computational resource."

CERN's GridCafe site further explains that "CERN has chosen Grid technology to solve a huge data storage and analysis challenge it faces in 2007, when the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest scientific instrument in the world, starts running. At that time, thousands of physicists around the world start clamouring for access to the huge mounds of data that will come out of the instrument. The data will be a goldmine for finding traces of new exotic fundamental particles of matter, which in turn will tell physicists a lot more about how the Universe was formed and what its future might be.

"The data will be produced at about 10 Petabytes a year. That is more than 1000x the amount of information in book form printed every year around the world, and nearly 10% of all information that humans produce on the planet each year - including digital images, photos and what have you. In short, that is a LOT of information.

"The only reasonable way to access this amount of information (actually, much more than this, since the cumulative data over more than a decade of operation will have to be stored) seems to be Grid technology.

"So CERN has taken a big gamble on Grid technology, and is pushing the technology forward in several ways, in order to make the 2007 deadline for the LHC."