Computer Technology
- Nikhef houses several calculation clusters for the European EGEE Grid (http://www.eu-egee.org/). Nowadays all of these computers are 'rack-mounted' to save space (photo: Nikhef/Dennis van Dok).
The management of the computer and network infrastructure at Nikhef falls under the responsibility of the Computer Technology Department. They also contribute to the software for the registration and control systems of the instrumentation for the particle detectors.
www
The cooperation within the international network that Nikhef is part of requires information to be rapidly and globally accessible to all network participants. Over the past 20 years, important contributions to the development of the Internet have been made within the discipline of subatomic physics. The most significant is undoubtedly the 'invention' of the World Wide Web in 1990 by a CERN employee in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee. Nikhef employee Willem van Leeuwen describes the involvement of Nikhef in the development of the www (PDF).
Grid: giga data storage
The historic involvement in the development of the Internet can still be seen at Nikhef. Since 1996, Nikhef and SARA in Amsterdam have housed one of the largest Internet exchanges in Europe. The AMS-IX has many participants, including a large number of telecommunication companies and Internet service providers.
Nikhef is working with grid computing so that it can transport and process large quantities of data from the recently commissioned, new generation particle accelerator LHC at CERN, and manage the storage of data on a large scale.
Computer infrastructure
At Nikhef, computers are used for a wide variety of purposes: on the one hand there are systems for administrative, technical and scientific use and on the other hand systems for the automation of the instrumentation of particle detectors. More than 350 servers and desktops are connected to the internal network, of which about half run on Unix (Linux) and about half on Windows systems.
