The first Tier-1center in Russia was opened in Dubna

News, 26 March 2015

The Tier-1center for the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider was presented on 26 March 2015 in Dubna in the Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. There are only 11 storage plants of that kind in the world; the12th center is being established in Russia on the basis of the NRC “Kurchatov Institute” and LIT, JINR. The decision to create a Tier-1 center in Russia for experiments at the Large Hadron Collider on the basis of the NRC “Kurchatov Institute” and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was made in November 2011 at the meeting of the committee on cooperation Russia-CERN (CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research). The Work Plan for a Tier-1 centre in Russia was approved a year later by the Supervisory Board of the WLCG (a GRID system which was designed at CERN to handle large amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider – LHC). In subsequent years, the Laboratory of Information Technologies worked to create the Tier-1 center for the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. On 26 March 2015, a new, unique for Russia, Tier-1 center was presented to participants of the session of the Committee of Plenipotentiaries of JINR Member States which was held in Dubna. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is one of two large general-purpose particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The goal of the CMS experiment is to investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson (this discovery of scientists, as we know, was awarded the Nobel Prize), extra dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research has been participating in the CMS experiment since its start (since the development of the concept of the experiment). The main directions of scientific-methodological and scientific-research activities of JINR in the CMS project are to create a system of end-cup detectors of the CMS facility and research of processes of the Standard Model in elementary particle interactions, search for “new physics” beyond the Standard Model and the Higgs boson discovery. Now the Tier-1 center for this experiment has been established in Dubna. It should be noted that scientists, as always, go ahead, showing possible applications of information technology for solving the most urgent problems not only in science. For example: the whole world was shocked with the recent crash of the passenger airliner Airbus A320 which crashed in the French Alps; and once again it turned out that the information of one of the “black boxes” that could shed light on the causes of the accident, was irretrievably lost. While advanced technology allows real-time transfer of all the information from the aircraft to the ground (as it was done by scientists in the experiments at the LHC, when they were transmitting and storing information in Tier-1 centers), which eliminates the loss of data.