Case Study: CERN keeps particle accelerators running with Akka

CERN keeps 2.5 million signals a day flowing with Akka

CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, needed a highly fault-tolerant system to acquire and analyze massive telemetry data from its seven particle accelerators, including the Large Hadron Collider. Their legacy relational system could not keep pace with the need for more complex analyses and lacked the resilience required for a mission-critical operation with near-zero tolerance for data loss. They turned to the Akka Agentic AI Platform to build a next-generation acquisition layer.

Implementing Akka allowed CERN to build a solution that processes over 2.5 million signals daily (roughly 3.5 TB) with virtually no data loss. The Akka platform provides exceptional fault-tolerance, enabling the cluster to self-heal during maintenance with no operator intervention. This has resulted in a system that runs for months without a break, adds new data subscriptions non-disruptively, and is built to scale with future data volumes from new projects like the HL-LHC.

CERN