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UK company Viglen to help scientists analyse big bang conditions at the LHC
UK manufacturer and IT solutions provider Viglen has been selected to provide part of the required processing power for analysing the conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang using the Large Hadron Collider (link opens in a new window) (LHC) in Geneva.
LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. It seeks to understand the origins of the universe and the particles and forces that it is made of, by colliding two beams of subatomic particles at very high energy and analysing the results of these collisions.
Viglen was awarded a share of two contracts worth £1.8m by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, to provide a substantial amount of the high performance computing and storage equipment needed to handle roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of annual data annually - enough to fill more than 1.7 million dual-layer DVDs or 20,000,000 million CDs.
Viglen had been able to bid for the contracts as a result of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s subscription to CERN on behalf of the UK. The UK is one of the biggest contributors to the LHC project contributing vital hardware, computing and scientific knowledge with around 150 scientists currently involved in the experiments
CERN spends around 34% of its budget on contracts with industry mostly in its 20 member states. STFC works with industry to enhance both the direct and indirect benefits which industry gets from its programme and provides assistance to UK companies interested in bidding for contracts across a wide range of activities, from computing, electronics and vacuum technology, to technical support work and cleaning facilities.
Professor John Womersley, Director of Science Programmes at STFC said: “CERN is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, with an annual budget of more than £650 million. Much of this is spent developing new technologies and facilities so there are many opportunities for UK companies to benefit from this work, both by winning contracts from CERN and by exploiting its new technologies in other areas. On average UK companies win around £15m every year in contracts from CERN. Viglen’s contracts are excellent news for both industry and the UK economy and ensure that UK technology continues to be a key part of the world’s biggest particle physics experiment.”
The awarding of this contract is not Viglen’s only contribution to technology at CERN. A computer cluster developed by Viglen with Queen Mary, University of London is, with other clusters in the UK and overseas, part of a computing Grid (GridPP) that contains over 100,000 processors to analyse the deluge of data expected from the LHC each year.
The LHC provided first collisions in late November 2009, after about 20 years of extremely challenging design and construction work for both the accelerator and the experiments. A few weeks later protons were accelerated for the first time in the LHC itself to an energy of 1.18 TeV/beam, the highest energy yet attained in accelerators. Around one hundred thousand collisions were recorded by the four LHC experiments at this energy.
Since then there was a technical stop to prepare the LHC for accelerating protons even further to an energy of 3.5 TeV/beam. The first high-energy beams started circulating in late February 2010 and even higher energies are expected in the coming weeks. It is expected that experiments will run for 18 months enabling scientists to accumulate enough data to explore new territory in all areas where new physics is expected.
Dr Olof Bärring responsible for computer facility planning and procurement at CERN said: “Viglen was one of the firms awarded large contracts for expanding our processing and storage capacity. This expansion, which represents almost a doubling of the total capacity, is required for meeting the scientific computing needs of the experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s highest energy particle accelerator commissioned end of 2009. Our strong requirements on performance, cost- and power efficiency were readily met by Viglen’s bid and we have been impressed by their experience in dealing with large scale computing and storage projects as well as the timely and reliable delivery of so much equipment.”
Bordan Tkachuk, CEO at Viglen commented: “We are honoured to be the only UK-based company to supply HPC solutions to CERN in this way. Like CERN, we maintain the same desire for excellence and this agreement will means that CERN will possess all the storage capacity and processing power for it to remain at the forefront of scientific research.”
Viglen have delivered their first shipment of 63 pallets to CERN, with the remaining two thirds being delivered and the equipment installed onto the LHC during the spring.
Any UK companies wanting to find out more about the wide range of contract opportunities available from CERN as they arise should register on STFC’s database (link opens in a new window).
Notes to editors
Images available
Images of the Viglen’s first delivery of equipment to CERN are available on request from the STFC press office.
Contacts
Viglen (link opens in a new window) is a leading British provider of innovative IT solutions to the Education and the Public Sector. With a pedigree second to none, Viglen is today one of the fastest growing IT solutions organisations, offering a totally integrated end-to-end service.
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Page last updated: 04 March 2010
by Karen Lee
