CERN Installation
25 February 2011 Source: In-house
Our role in this scientific experiment includes the supply of a High-Performance Computing (HPC) solution, in a three-year deal worth £1.8 million. As previous suppliers to the laboratory's associated GridPP UK-based sites, Boston and Viglen were awarded this contract by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, Switzerland.
The agreement will equip CERN with a substantial part of the computing and storage technology required for processing roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of annual data; enough to fill more than 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs a year. The agreement comprises almost 5000 Intel Nehalem processor cores and storage capacity which is backed up by in-house maintenance and support structures.
Thousands of scientists around the world will want to access and analyse this data, and our system will store and process vast amounts of data generated by the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, in one of CERN's most ambitious projects to date which seeks to understand the origins of the universe. The LHC will recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding two very high energy beams of subatomic particles.
Viglen was one of the firms awarded large contracts for expanding our processing and storage capacity. This expansion, which represents almost a doubling of the total capacity, is required for meeting the scientific computing needs of the experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's highest energy particle accelerator commissioned end of 2009. Our strong requirements on performance, cost and power efficiency were readily met by Viglen's solutions and we have been impressed by their experience in dealing with large scale computing and storage projects as well as the timely and reliable delivery.
Dr Olof Barring, Head of IT procurement, CERN
