Introduction

Laser-interferometric gravitational wave antennas face one of the most formidable data handling problems in all of physics. The problem is compounded of several parts: the data will be taken at reasonably high data rates (of the order of 20 kHz of 16 bit data); they may be accompanied by twice as much ‘housekeeping” data to ensure that the system is working appropriately; the data will be collected 24 hours a day for many years; the data need to be searched in real time for a variety of rare, weak events of short duration (one second or less); the data need to be searched for pulsar signals; the data from two or more detectors should be cross-correlated with each other; and the data need to be archived in searchable form in case later information makes a re-analysis desirable. One detector might generate 400 Mbytes of data each hour. Even using optical discs or digital magnetic tapes with a capacity of 3 Gbytes, a network of four interferometers would generate almost 5000 discs or tapes per year. The gathering, exchange, analysis, and storage of these data will require international agreements on standards and protocols. The object of all of this effort will of course be to make astronomical observations. Because the detectors are nearly omni-directional, a network of at least three and preferably more detectors will be necessary to reconstruct a gravitational wave event completely, from which the astronomical information can be inferred.