Amsterdam, 24 November 2009: Just hours after the first proton collisions were recorded at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, data from these collisions arrived at the Tier-1 computing and storage facility in Amsterdam. This facility is part of the worldwide LHC computing grid, which is the computational backbone used by thousands of physicists to transport, analyze, and store data related to the experiments.
The collision data recorded in Geneva is distributed over the LHC computing grid to eleven Tier-1 centers, spread over three continents. One of these Tier-1 centers is located in Science Park Amsterdam, operated jointly by SARA and Nikhef. The new data from the LHC is being stored on new equipment at the Dutch Tier-1; during November, nearly two petabytes of new storage, and nearly 3000 new processors were added to the Tier-1 facility, along with major upgrades to the data centers in support of the massive data analyses soon to be launched on the collision data from the LHC.
The Tier-1 for LHC physics is a service provided by the Dutch BiG Grid project. BiG Grid supports a wide range of computing for scientific research in the Netherlands. The Nikhef and SARA facilities are also used to perform analyses for those sciences, such as the LOFAR radio-astronomy experiment, drug discovery research, and brain research.
For more information on BiG Grid go to http://www.biggrid.nl/