CERN Expands Big Data Network

Landmark discoveries in physics, such as that of the Higgs Boson, made with help of the Large Hadron Collider required not only a large amount of engineering ingenuity (in building the LHC) and physics expertise (in designing the experiments) but also a dose of big data management.

In order to provide better data support for the LHC, CERN will be expanding its big data network to a new data center in Hungary. To facilitate that expansion, CERN will use the new GEANT scientific network launched in May.

The LHC produces over 100 petabytes a year of data, a figure that is difficult to contain in a location already crowded by a particle accelerator. Further, making that information available to a larger scientific community benefits the research. As a result, a decent amount of that data gets transferred across a network to various sites like the new Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Budapest.

However, transferring that data requires networking implementations beyond those seen before. This is where GEANT comes in. According to David Foster, Deputy Head of CERN’s IT Department, “Having a remote site and operations places a lot of requirements on the networking solutions. Together with GÉANT and NIIF/Hungarnet, as well as our research and education and commercial partners we will be implementing state-of-the-art capabilities to connect CERN and Wigner.”

The GEANT network will reportedly be the first to use multiple 100 Gbps links. Initially, across the core network, the system will be able to deliver transfer speeds in multiples of 100 Gbps up to 500 Gbps. Upon full implementation, GEANT will be able to support 2 Tbps across the core network. This was demonstrated at SC12 last week when an inter-connect was set up between LHC Tier-2 computing sites and the Salt Lake City show floor.

As physics research becomes increasingly data intensive, especially with regard to projects at the LHC, managing and networking the resulting big data becomes as much of a task as the actual physics. The hope is that the GEANT network and the new Wigner data center will allow seamless continuation of the research being done in Geneva and across Europe.

Related Articles

20 Lessons Enterprise CIOs Can Learn from Supercomputing

Amazon Accelerates NASA’s Search for Life on Mars

A Different Einstein on Another Old Problem