Hungarian Centre wins CERN IT contract
The Wigner Research Centre for Physics, in Budapest, secured a contract to host an extension to the CERN data centre earlier this month. The Wigner centre will accommodate CERN equipment which will boost both the capabilities and the security of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.
“Installing computing capacity at the Wigner Centre allows us to power additional equipment, as well as secure our operations, due to the remote nature of the resources” said Frédéric Hemmer, the head of CERN’s IT Department.
“For example: should we suffer a prolonged power cut at CERN we will be able to transfer critical functions to the Wigner Centre, mitigating the risk of having all of Tier-0 in one location.”
Tier-0 – the heart of the Grid, based at CERN – currently provides around 30 petabytes of data storage, and includes the majority of the 65,000 processing cores hosted in the CERN computer centre. The Grid is available to over 8,000 scientists who work on the LHC experiments, providing distributed computing facilities and large-scale data storage.
Under this new agreement, the Wigner Centre will extend these capabilities with 20,000 new cores and 5.5 petabytes of extra storage: with this planned to be doubled after three years.
The contract will initially run until the end of 2015, with the possibility of extensions thereafter.
“This new collaboration between the Wigner Centre and CERN sets a landmark in the history of Hungarian collaboration with CERN,” said Peter Levai, Director General of the Wigner Centre. “[This is] a fitting way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hungary’s accession to CERN Membership and an excellent start to the next 20 years.”
