CERN today signed a contract with the Wigner Research Centre for Physicsin Budapest for an extension to the CERN data centre. Under the new agreement, the Wigner Centre will host CERN equipment that will substantially extend the capabilities of the LHC Computing Grid Tier-0 activities and provide the opportunity for business continuity solutions to be implemented. This contract is initially until 31 December 2015, with the possibility of up to four one-year extensions thereafter.

“Installing computing capacity at the Wigner Centre allows us to power additional equipment as well as secure our operations due to the remote nature of the resources” said Frédéric Hemmer, Head of CERN’s IT Department. “For example, should we suffer a prolonged power cut at CERN, we will be able to transfer critical functions to the Wigner Centre, mitigating the risk of having all of Tier-0 in one location.”

“Having a remote site and operations places a lot of requirements on the networking solutions. Together with our commercial, research and education partners we will be looking for state-of-the-art capabilities to connect CERN and Wigner,” added David Foster, Deputy Head of the CERN IT Department.

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) is a global system organized in tiers, with the central hub being Tier-0 at CERN. Eleven major Tier-1 centres around the world are linked to CERN via dedicated high-bandwidth links. Smaller Tier-2 and Tier-3 centres linked over the Internet bring the total number of computer centres involved to over 140 in 35 countries. The WLCG serves a community of some 8000 scientists working on LHC experiments, allowing them to access distributed supercomputing and data-storage facilities seamlessly.

The CERN Tier-0 currently provides some 30 PetaBytes of data storage on disk, and includes the majority of the 65,000 processing cores in the CERN computer centre. Under the new agreement, the Wigner Centre will extend this capacity with 20,000 cores and 5.5 PB of disk data, and will see this doubling after 3 years.

“This new collaboration between the Wigner Centre and CERN sets a landmark in the history of Hungarian collaboration with CERN,” said Peter Levai, Director General of the Wigner RCP. “A fitting way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hungary’s accession to CERN Membership, and an excellent start to the next 20 years.”

The Wigner Centre won the contract following a competitive call to tender.