Budapest to host CERN Data Center

Budapest will host the new data-processing center of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), from 2013. The facility, providing a bandwidth never seen in Hungary before, will be established in the outskirts of the Hungarian capital.

The physics research center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, bearing the name of Hungarian-born Nobel laureate physicist, Jenõ (Eugene) Wigner beat thirty applicants, mainly multinational companies, to win the tender for the HUF 40 billion (EUR 140 million) investment.

The hub will provide data-processing services for the huge volumes of research material that CERN scientists gather from their experiments. One of its key functions will be to process incoming results from CERN’s famous large hadron collider.

To highlight the Budapest site’s capacity (which is set to have bigger broadband capacity than the rest of Hungary combined), deputy state secretary in charge of info-communications, Vilmos Vályi-Nagy, said the bandwidth would be sufficient to transfer 2,000 mp3 music files every second or to send the digitized version of all the books in Hungary’s central library (appr. four million volumes) in 15 minutes.

Besides CERN, the hub will also be offering its capacity and services to potentially thousands of scientists around the world. CERN will shortly announce tenders for the computer infrastructure that will be installed in the Budapest center, which is scheduled to be operational by January 1, 2013.