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More information about CERN

The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), located on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, provides experimental facilities for particle physics experiments, mainly in the domain of high energy physics (HEP). To defray the cost of running such a facility, CERN, established as an International Treaty Organisation, is supported by twenty member states: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and Unesco have observer status. CERN has a yearly budget of nearly 1 billion SF, employs 2750 people and serves more than 6000 experimental physicists directly involved in its scientific program.

CERN's current major facility is LEP, the Large Electron Positron collider in a 27-km tunnel, the largest machine of this type in the world. Four very large experiments in man-made caverns intersect the LEP tunnel, constituting about half of CERN's total experimental program for the 1990s. Each of the experiments is carried out by teams of several hundred of physicists from more than 50 institutes spread over the five continents.

The next particle accelerator, to be completed in year 2005, is the 14 TeV (1 Tera electron volt = 1 billion electron volts) Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC, a particle accelerator built from high powered superconducting magnets each 14 metres long, will be installed in the already existing LEP tunnel. The powerful magnets will hold counter-rotating beams of protons on a steady course around the ring as superconducting accelerating cavities 'kick' them almost to the speed of light at energies higher than have ever been reached in accelerators. When these proton beams collide, at fixed crossing points, their combined energy of motion will produce an intense micro-fireball which will shoot out hundreds of new particles. These flashes of energy will probe the interactions between the tiny quark constituents hidden deep inside the colliding protons and reveal how Nature works at the most fundamental levels.

All existing and future CERN experiments produce large amounts of data. For example, the LEP experiments generate 25 terabytes of data each year, which are stored on magnetic tape cartridges, whereas the LHC experiments are expected to produce several order of magnitudes more data. The sheer volume of the data combined with the complexity of the analysis to be performed, and the requirement that the processing of the data may also be done remotely, places heavy demands on the High Energy & Nuclear Physics (HENP) computing and networking infrastructure, which can only be met by using leading edge technology and services.

 
 
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