CERN data center opens in Budapest

CERN, European organization for nuclear research based in Geneva, Switzerland, inaugurated its data center in Budapest, marking the completion of the facility hosting the extension for CERN computing resources.

A press release by CERN points out that about 500
servers, 20,000 computing cores, and 5.5 Petabytes of storage are already
operational at the site in the Buda hills. The dedicated and redundant 100 Gbit/s circuits
connecting the two sites are functional since February 2013 and are among the
first transnational links at this distance. The capacity at Wigner will be
remotely managed from CERN, substantially extending the capabilities of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and  bolstering CERN's
infrastructure business continuity.

WLCG's mission is to provide global computing resources to store, distribute and analyze more than 25 Petabytes of data annually generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. It is a global system organized in tiers, with the central hub being at CERN. Altogether, the total number of computer centres involved to over 140 in about 40 countries.

WLCG serves a global community of 8,000 scientists working on LHC experiments, allowing them to access distributed computing and data storage facilities seamlessly. Every day, WLCG processes more than 1.5 million 'jobs', which is equivalent to a single computer running for more than 600 years. High-performance distributed computing enabled physicists to announce last year the discovery of a new particle, which was later on confirmed as being a Higgs boson.

This Budapest extension of CERN’s data center adds up to 2.5 MW capacity to the 3.5 MW IT load of the Geneva data center, which has already reached its capacity limit. The contract with Wigner started in January 2013 and can carry on for up to seven years. The capacity in Budapest will gradually ramp-up following CERN’s needs. Operating remotely from CERN, this capacity helps build knowledge, as well as create expertise and solutions with cloud computing to face big data challenges linked to exponential computing needs in all fields of research.