The world's largest computing grid is to be formed in the UK, backed by Pounds 16 million from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council. A prototype grid has been running across ten UK sites over the past year to develop the middleware (a layer of software between network and applications) needed for the virtual supercomputer, dubbed GridPP2. The new money will take the project forward before it becomes part of a larger European grid to process the data generated by Cern's Large Hadron Collider.