The world record for data throughput rates has been shattered by a global grid computing research consortium.

Transfer of 600MB of data across the world for up to 10 days have been carried out in testing between research bases in Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany and the US. The grid is operated by Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland.

"This challenge is a key step on the way to managing the torrents of data anticipated from the Large Hadron Collider," said Jamie Shiers, manager of the service challenges at Cern.

"When the LHC starts operating in 2007 it will be the most data-intensive physics instrument on the planet, producing more than 1,500MB of data every second for over a decade."

The grid project was finished in March and Britain was the biggest single contributor of computing power.

The grid is still being improved and the operators want to greatly increase the processing power in the coming years.