"The years 2007 and 2008 will mark the completion of the Pierre Auger observatory and the start of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, respectively. Whereas the former has been built to uncover the sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, the latter is designed to test the Standard Model of particle physics. In both experiments, the use of Monte Carlo (MC) models to describe hadronic intera ...