Scared of heights? Don't look down. And don't get too excited about all those gamma rays and start hyperventilating: the partial pressure of oxygen at this laboratory is about half that at sea level. Image courtesy of EUChinaGRID

Being 4,300 meters above sea level brings you closer not only to the stars, but also to the things stars spit out: gamma rays.

For researchers eager to detect these gamma rays before the rays are absorbed by the atmosphere, this is a good place to be, or at least, it is a good place to put your equipment.

In Tibet, 90 kilometers north of Lhasa, sits the High Altitude Cosmic Ray Laboratory. The lab, run by a Chinese-Italian collaboration, will use the EUChinaGRID infrastructure to store and transfer data so it can be accessed by collaborators around the world.

EUChinaGRID expects to transfer 250 terabytes a year to Beijing, and then on to Italy, at the steady rate of around 10 megabytes per second.