A British manufacturer has been chosen to provide processing power to help scientists analyse vast amounts of data from Cern’s Large Hadron Collider.
Manufacturer and IT provider Viglen said it had been awarded two contracts worth £1.8 million to provide part of the high-performance computing and storage technology needed to handle 15 petabytes, or 15 million gigabytes, of annual data – enough to fill 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs or millions of CDs.
The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Researchers aim to use it to boost understanding of the origins of the universe, and the particles and forces that it is made of, by smashing two beams of subatomic particles together at very high energy and analysing the results of the collisions.
Viglen said it had been able to bid for the contracts as a result of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) subscription to Cern on behalf of the UK. The UK is one of the biggest contributors to the LHC project, contributing hardware, computing and scientific knowledge, with 150 scientists involved in the experiments.
Cern spends 34% of its budget on contracts with industry, most of which are in its 20 member states. Professor John Womersley, director of science programmes at STFC, said: “Cern is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, with an annual budget of more than £650 million.
“Much of this is spent developing new technologies and facilities so there are many opportunities for UK companies to benefit from this work, both by winning contracts from Cern and by exploiting its new technologies in other areas.
“On average UK companies win £15 million every year in contracts from Cern.
Viglen’s contracts are excellent news for both industry and the UK economy and ensure that UK technology continues to be a key part of the world’s biggest particle physics experiment.”
The awarding of this contract is not Viglen’s only contribution to technology at Cern. A computer cluster developed by the company in association with Queen Mary College, University of London, is, with other clusters in the UK and overseas, part of a computing grid that contains over 100,000 processors to analyse the deluge of data expected from the Large Hadron Collider each year.
© PE Publishing, 5 March 2010
