A new data-center for CC-IN2P3

The inaugural ceremony of the new computer room of the CNRS/IN2P3 Computing Center will take place on September 27th 2011 in presence of its regional, national and international partners.

Funded in the framework of a contract (CPER 2007-2013) between the French government through CNRS, and the Rhône-Alpes region, the new building is located on a land given by the Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University. In 2009 the project has received an important boost from the national economic stimulus plan.

The new 900 square meters computer room will allow CC-IN2P3 to offer an even more efficient service to the research community by fulfilling its ambitious international commitments in the framework of the LHC project while offering a premium quality services to its other users.

At the junction between the infinitely small and the infinitely large, within 10 years from now, the astroparticle domain will be in need of a data processing capacity that will exceed everything that has been done up to now by a huge factor. With its modern design, the new computer room will provide the digital infrastructure needed to extract the scientific results from several large scale international astroparticle projects. Very few places in the academic world are offering such such capacities; the new computer room is therefore a very important equipment in the CNRS strategy.

Recently CC-IN2P3 launched the TIDRA initiative (Data processing and distributed computing in Rhône-Alpes) which offers a distributed computing infrastructure to regional laboratories and to private companies. The new computer room will also play an important role for this project.

The new data center has been designed in a modular way to be able to ramp up in power in the future. This modularity will allow to accommodate every future evolution of the scientific field. As of today, the capacity of the new room is of the same order as the old one. Ultimately it will be 4 to 5 times larger.

A data center such as CC-IN2P3 needs very strong power supplies. This electrical power is dissipated as heat that should be evacuated. Committed to limit its environmental impact, CC-IN2P3 has chosen to install special cooling equipments in order to generate hot water and to make it available to heat campus buildings. This approach is in phase with the current University plans to build new laboratories in the physics quarter, close to the CC-IN2P3.

The very high technical value of the data center was an opportunity to use a derogatory design and build procedure, first of its kind within CNRS. We are aware of our luck to own this wonderful tool for science and innovation. On the 27th of September it will be our pleasure to meet and thank all those who made this achievement possible. This inauguration ceremony is also a good opportunity to gather our partners and users who are going to be able to exploit all the possibilities of this new data center.