Computing and data processing facilities

Irfu has computer rooms in building 141 equipped with 31 racks, housing about 7000 cores and a storage capacity of 5 Petabytes. They were modernised between 2013 and 2017 and are today cooled by a centralised and highly energy-efficient free-chilling system with a capacity of 770 kW. Based on current projections, this capacity guarantees long-term operation until 2025.

Servers in one of the IRFU computer rooms

More specifically, the computer rooms host:

The Windows and Unix infrastructure for the Institute
A Tier 2/Tier 3 node of the Île-de-France computing grid (GRIF) primarily processing LHC data, but also data for the HESS and CTA experiments. This node accounts for about 13% of the French computing effort for the LHC and is added to the CEA contribution to CC-IN2P3, raising the IRFU contribution to about 18% of the French effort. An exceptional equipment effort was made in 2016-2017 in order to address the needs linked to LHC Run 2.
Computer clusters dedicated to modelling, simulation, data processing and visualisation for astrophysics, particle physics and accelerators. These “meso-machines” can run intermediate size calculations and allow for the development and testing of parallel code, before that code can be run on the large national (GENCI) or international computing centres. The capacity of ANAIS, the main computing cluster dedicated to astrophysics was doubled in 2018 reaching now 2400 CPU cores and a disk storage capacity of 1 PBytes.

Left: IRFU contribution to LHC calculations; Right: a) evolution of CPU and storage resources at the IRFU GRIF node. b) Evolution of GRID node resources — 1 CPU core is equal to about 20 HS06.

#4462 - Last update : 06/19 2018

Division of Electronics, Detectors and Computing for Physics (DEDIP)

Institute of Research into the Fundamental Laws of the Universe