Sussex University is at the centre of a bid to plot the history of the universe.
The £2 million CosmoGrid, headed by the world-renowned physicist Professor Stephen Hawking, is a collaboration between the universities of Sussex, Cambridge, Manchester, Oxford, Portsmouth and Imperial College, London.
The CosmoGrid is a computer network to support the Cosmos project, which deals with the universe's evolution from fractions of a second after the Big Bang to the present day, more than ten billion years later.
It was launched in 1997, once researchers had realised cosmology problems could be tackled using supercomputers.
The University of Sussex has been involved in the project from the start and has a good reputation in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology.
Professor Hawking said: "A key research area of our consortium is the scientific exploration of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang.
"We will be using the Cosmos supercomputer to develop techniques to analyse data from the world's most ambitious CMB experiment, the Planck Surveyor satellite, due to be launched in 2007. It will give us new information about the origin and present state of our universe."
At the heart of CosmoGrid is a supercomputer in Cambridge, which will be linked to systems at six other university sites, creating the largest grid of its sort in the UK.
Mark Hindmarsh, reader in theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, said: "The CosmoGrid is a positive development for our research. The collaborators clubbed together in the early days to buy a supercomputer but it's kept at the University of Cambridge and is quite difficult to use remotely.
"The grid of several universities will spread out the technology and bring computing power to researcher's desktops, where it's needed."
Mr Hindmarsh and his colleague Ed Copeland, will use the "little toy", a mini version of the computer in Cambridge.
He said: "It's important to have these resources because for a lot of problems it's computers or nothing."
The main work of the project will be to trim the number of alternative theories about the Big Bang and prepare for the launch of the Planck Surveyor satellite.
Mr Hindmarsh said:
"We're bedevilled by surplus of theories and not enough data, so we're using computers to test the theories and kill the incorrect ones off."
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