Particle physics laboratory CERN has inaugurated a data center in Prévessin, France.
The facility, deployed at CERN's existing site, spans 6,000 square meters (64,600 sq ft) across six rooms.
Each hall has a cooling capacity of 2MW, and can house up to 78 racks. It is expected to take a decade to fully populate.
Probing the universe: Upgrading CERN
The world’s largest particle accelerator, CERN’s large hadron collider, is getting an upgrade. So is CERN’s data center infrastructure
The facility will primarily host CPU servers for physics data processing, alongside a small amount of servers and storage capacity for business continuity and disaster recovery.
The new data center, built over the course of two years, will provide waste heat to local buildings. It has a PUE target of 1.1, and a WUE target of 0.379 liters per kWh.
The cooling system will kick in only when outside temperatures reach 20°C (68°F), with overall operational temperatures capped at 32°C (89.6°F)
CERN's existing data center on the Meyrin site in Switzerland will continue to house the majority of the organization’s data storage capacity - which recently passed one exabyte.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently produces around 45 petabytes per week, but the number is expected to double when the accelerator is upgraded to become the High-Luminosity LHC.
Beyond CERN's own data centers, data from CERN's experiments is sent to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), a network of around 170 data centers across more than 40 countries, with a storage capacity of about three exabytes and one million CPU cores distributed across the network.
