Case Study: Nikhef achieves Tier-1 LHC data storage and processing with SURF

SURF and Nikhef receive data from LHC particle accelerator

The customer, NIKHEF, a Dutch national institute for subatomic physics, required a robust infrastructure to handle, store, and analyze the massive amounts of data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. They partnered with the vendor, SURF, to form a Tier-1 computing site, leveraging SURF's high-performance computing (HPC) and data storage services to meet this significant challenge.

SURF provided the solution through a collaborative long-term partnership, co-managing the Dutch Tier-1 site. SURF supplied substantial computational resources, including thousands of processor cores and petabytes of disk and tape storage, which were integrated with NIKHEF's own hardware. This collaboration successfully enabled the storage and analysis of ten percent of all LHC data, establishing the Netherlands as a key global research hub and providing a powerful grid computing model for other scientific fields to utilize.

NIKHEF

Frank Linde

Director and Physics