The European Union has awarded CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, $9.23 million (SFr15 million) to develop a more powerful version of the World Wide Web.

In an announcement on Friday, CERN said its DataGrid project would build on emerging technologies to create a web able to analyse vast amounts of data.

It said DataGrid would help coordinate national Grid projects and would link supercomputers, major databases, informatic systems and users in a high-speed network.

CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web 10 years ago, said the present version was running out of capacity.

"The web is frankly saturated, with the number of users doubling every six months," said DataGrid project manager, Fabrizio Gagliardi.

One of the project's first challenges will be to deal with the mass of data generated by its future particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to be up and running by 2005.

CERN said the computing power required to handle and process that amount of data was roughly equivalent to about 100,000 of today's PC computers.

swissinfo with agencies

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