TRIUMF and IBM announced that Canada's contribution to a worldwide network of supercomputers is ready to process data from the world's largest particle accelerator. After a significant hardware upgrade, the ATLAS Tier 1 Data Centre at TRIUMF was successfully integrated into an international “Grid” of high performance computing centres. The new supercomputer built by IBM passed a grueling set of tests to prepare it to analyze millions of gigabytes data a year starting in the summer of 2008. The Tier 1 Centre is now one of the most powerful computing facilities in Canada.
Scientists from a consortium of 10 Canadian universities and TRIUMF are participating in the ATLAS experiment at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. ATLAS is the largest scientific instrument ever built, designed to study conditions that existed less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. These conditions will be created by the world’s largest particle accelerator, the 27 kilometre in circumference Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will collide subatomic particles at the highest energies ever achieved in the laboratory. The Canadian team will use the IBM System Cluster 1350 supercomputer at the Tier 1 Centre to analyze the information produced by the ATLAS experiment, estimated to be equivalent to half a million DVDs worth of data every year. TRIUMF’s Cluster 1350 was specially designed to handle the unprecendented data processing requirements of the CERN experiments.
“We are extremely pleased to have the first phase of the data analysis centre complete,” said Michel Vetterli, physics professor at Simon Fraser University and TRIUMF, and leader of Canada's Tier 1 project. “The system has performed very well during full-scale tests where it was incorporated into the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. The ground-breaking discoveries enabled by the Tier 1 will revolutionize the way we describe the universe.”
The Canadian ATLAS Tier 1 Data Centre was funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and a contribution by IBM.