Swiss Institute of Particle Physics - CHIPP

The international high-energy physics community at CERN has built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the world biggest accelerator. One of the greatest challenges of the LHC project is the acquisition and analysis of the data. The relevant data volume is between 100 MByte/sec and 1 GByte/sec. Each experiment is expected to collect 1 PByte of raw data per year. 2000 physicists per experiment contribute to the development of hardware and software and they expect to have almost instantaneous access to the data and to a set of up-to-date analysis tools, [Ref: www.cern.ch/lcg].

Switzerland, as a member state of CERN, actively participates in the LHC project as a whole. CHIPP is the virtual institute of all Swiss particle physics laboratories involved in scientific analysis and development of the data produced by the experiments of the LHC. CSCS has operated the computational infrastructure for CHIPP since 2003.

As of 2012, the GRID cluster comprises: 

- 1888 Intel Xeon E5-2670 (SandyBridge) HyperThreading cores at 2.6 GHz, with 2 GB RAM per core.
- 360 AMD Opteron 6272 (Interlagos) cores at 2.1 GHz, with 3 GB RAM per core.
- A total of 21800 HEP-SPEC06 computing power which is equivalent to 21.8 TFs.
- 1.1 PB of usable permanent storage based on dCache.
- 170 TB of scratch storage based on GPFS, providing up to 8 GB/s transfer rates, with metadata on SSD drives.
- Infiniband QDR Interconnect with 40 Gbit/s bandwidth per link.
- 10 Gbit/s external network connection to the Swiss backbone.
- Main High Particle Physics VOs supported: ATLAS, CMS and LHCb.
- Other VOs supported: HONE, GEAR, OPS and DTEAM.

The current cluster activity is available to the public here.