The Hungarian data processing house used by CERN – the collaboration behind the Large Hadron Collider - will be one of the first facilities linked to the new GEANT terabit network designed for big data.

GEANT is the high-speed European communication network designed for research and education that is used by more than 8,000 institutions in 40 countries throughout Europe.

It is working with the National Research and Education Network (NREN) to provide the secure data transmission that will be used by projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, on the Franco-Swiss border west of Geneva, which alone generates about 30 Petabytes of data a year.

CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) IT Department Deputy Head David Foster said the network is critical to CERN’s investigations into particle and high-energy physics.

“Having a remote site and operations places a lot of requirements on the networking solutions,” Foster said.

The Budapest facility at the MTA Wigner Research Center for Physics said with CERN operating there it will be one of the most advanced information systems in the world “with the largest dedicated data transfer capacity in Europe”.

Back in May CERN said it will be setting up a facility for data processing at the site as part of a US$185m supercomputing project.

“The tremendous amount of data and equipment of the Tier-0 infrastructure of the CERN will be hosted in the WIGNER data center, providing Hungary with a unique advantage in information technology, science and economy,” The Hungarian Academy of Sciences said.

The project has since been branded as the CERN@WIGNER project, which once complete will be the nation’s first ultra-high bandwidth data center.

The GEANT network will provide data transfer from CERN’s primary facility and this Hungary data center.

“Together with GEANT and NIIF (National Information Infrastructure Development Institute)/Hungarnet (the Hungarian Academic and Research Network Association), as well as our research and education and commercial partners, we will be implementing state-of-the-art capabilities to connect CERN and Wigner.

NIIF/Hungarnet will provide extreme high speed connectivity for data communications between the GEANT Point of Presence in Budapest and the Wigner Site in CERN’s remote center.

The GEANT Network was built by its current operator DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), the group owned by the European national and research and education networks which builds communications infrastructure for the global research community.