A high-performance computing infrastructure the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has been using for one particle-accelerator experiment will be extended to give access to hundreds of universities and laboratories around the world for use in three more research projects.

A Dell-led IT industry consortium has been providing computing horsepower for CERN's Atlas experiment, conducted at the organization's Large Hardon Collider. LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator that lies in a tunnel near Geneva.

Atlas is one of two particle detectors used to record and visualize explosions that result from particle collisions at the accelerators. The detector is used to search for extra dimensions, particles that could make up dark matter and the Higgs boson, an elementary particle whose existence has not been confirmed.

The expansion of the LHC technology program will give more than 400 research institutions access to computing resources that have until now been available only to those involved in Atlas. The three additional experiments that will now have access to the HPC horsepower are Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), A Large Ion Collider Experiment (Alice) and Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb).

In addition to Dell, the industry consortium includes Intel, Data Direct, QLogic, Force 10 and Platform Computing. Together, its members are working to develop an open IT architecture powered by Dell's PowerEdge servers.

Andrew Lankford, a University of California physics professor and deputy spokesperson for Atlas, said the HPC solutions the consortium provided ensured accelerated scientific computing and data analysis for scientists worldwide. "The LHC community should find the access to ÔǪ highly efficient and productive computing network infrastructure solutions as a key ingredient in expanding its scientific discovery processes."