Brazil stood out before the international scientific community with the entrance of the High Energy Experimental Physics Laboratory (Lafex), of the Brazilian Center for Physics Research (CBPF), of the Relativistic Heavy Ions Group (Griper) and of the Physics Institute of the University of São Paulo (USP) into the exclusive team of computer grids that take part in the LHCONE network.

In operation since 2011, LHCONE has been managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) and is a network infrastructure service conceived exclusively for the projects of the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In it, experiments take place, which generate such a large quantity of data that extrapolates the resources of Cern’s own data center, with 100 petabytes, equivalent to 700 years of Full HD quality films. Due to that, the processing of such data is distributed among 150 computer centers spread out in 40 countries, which form the largest computer grid in the world, the WLCG (Worldwide LHC Computing Grid).

In order to ensure greater safety and priority for the data, in addition to a better network outflow and performance, LHCONE works as a network juxtaposed to the existing physical network, interconnecting several websites of institutions that house computer grids that are LHC’s collaborators, by means of the academic networks. That is the case of Lafex, which in July, 2015 started to fulfill the minimum network requisites required by Cern to be a member of the exclusive network.

However, for it to happen, it was necessary to overcome certain performance issues, given that the CBPF is connected to the Brazilian academic network in an indirect manner, through the Rio metropolitan network (Rede Rio), with a band capacity that evolved until it reached the current 10 Gb/s.

Since 2010, the Research and Development department of the Brazilian National Research and Educational Network (RNP), which operates the Brazilian academic network, focused on mapping out the data transfers made by Lafex, in order to find possible flaws in the pathway between the laboratory and the national backbone, and then between the international connections and Europe. “We used monitoring platform perfSONAR, which helped us to visualize where the issues where occurring along such path”, says RNP’s Experimentation Networks Manager, Alex Moura.

In addition to RNP, Rede-Rio/Faperj and teams from large international backbones of the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks (RedCLARA), from Géant and from Cern contributed to the success achieved. A part of the project received funding from the Institutional Qualification Program (PCI) of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI).

Read the original article: http://www.rnp.br/es/destaques/brasil-pasa-integrar-la-red-lhcone