Research News
"FAIR Tera Net" is put into operation by the symbolic pushing of a button. In the picture (from left to right): Prof. Volker Lindenstruth, Secretary of State Ingmar Jung, Prof. Werner Müller-Esterl, Prof. Hans Jürgen Lüdde. Photo: Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies
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New Data Highway for FAIR
In a first development phase, the high-speed data network "FAIR Tera Net" has been put into service. It connects the universities in the Federal State of Hessen and the LOEWE-CSC supercomputer with the future international accelerator centre FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research GmbH in Darmstadt. Future experiments conducted at FAIR will yield huge amounts of data, the evaluation of which requires a highly efficient IT infrastructure.
Already now, the "FAIR Tera Net" allows the LOEWE-CSC to take over data processing for physical experiments at CERN in Geneva, with which the GSI is directly connected. In 2014, the GSI data processing centre "Green Cube" is to be put into service for FAIR in Darmstadt, thus providing more supercomputer capacity for research purposes.
The "FAIR Tera Net" was jointly implemented by the GSI and the Helmholtz International Center for FAIR and is part of the Hessian Landes-Offensive zur Ent-wicklung Wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz (LOEWE - federal state offensive for the development of scientific-economic excellence).
The Frankfurt-based high performance computer LOEWE-CSC works extremely fast and energy efficient and is fully operated with power from regenerative energy sources, making it one of the first CO2 neutral computers worldwide.
At present, LOEWE-CSC is the fifth-fastest computer in Germany. It now was awarded the title of "Landmark" by the "Land of Ideas" site initiative.
