Particle Physics - optical private network for global data delivery  



The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is said to be the largest scientific endeavour in history. By colliding particles at extremely high energies, the LHC’s experiments will generate some 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually. This huge amount of data is distributed to 11 primary processing centres around the world, from where it is accessed and analysed by thousands of scientists, engineers and support staff. GÉANT and the NREN partners have deployed a vast private network with sufficient bandwidth reserved specifically for LHC researchers to facilitate this data distribution and analysis, and linking each processing site to CERN by a dedicated connection. To support the LHC Optical Private Network (LHCOPN), GÉANT’s perfSONAR multi-domain monitoring (MDM) service has been implemented to monitor network status and performance across each of these connections.

“The LHC Optical Private Network (LHCOPN) is core to delivering physics data to the LHC scientists worldwide. To ensure the quality of the services, we need a rigorous active monitoring system that can identify real-time problems. The collaboration of the LHCOPN with the GÉANT project and the NRENs as well as the partner institutes has enabled DANTE to provide a robust and extensible system that now has a global reach.”  – Dr David Foster, European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN)