Image credit: Wigner Research Centre.
Following a competitive call for tender, CERN has signed a contract with the Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Budapest for an extension to CERN’s data centre. Under the new agreement, the Wigner Centre will host CERN equipment that will substantially extend the capabilities of Tier-0 of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and provide the opportunity to implement solutions for business continuity. The contract is initially until 31 December 2015, with the possibility of up to four one-year extensions thereafter.
The WLCG is a global system organized in tiers, with the central hub being Tier-0 at CERN. Eleven major Tier-1 centres around the world are linked to CERN via dedicated high-bandwidth links. Smaller Tier-2 and Tier-3 centres linked via the internet bring the total number of computer centres involved to more than 140 in 35 countries. The WLCG serves a community of some 8000 scientists working on LHC experiments, allowing seamless access, distributed computing and data-storage facilities.
The Tier-0 at CERN currently provides some 30 PB of data storage on disk and includes the majority of the 65,000 processing cores in the CERN Computer Centre. Under the new agreement, the Wigner Research Centre will extend this capacity with 20,000 cores and 5.5 PB of disk storage, and will see this doubling after three years.
