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Bon anniversaire, IN2P3!

This year, IN2P3, a longstanding member of the EGI Federation, celebrates its 50th anniversary.

EGI had the pleasure of attending the celebration live in Villeurbanne, near Lyon, France. You can check the full programme here.

Over 250 participants attended the morning session with overviews of the IN2P3 history, a networking lunch and an afternoon series of visits to discover  'l'Institut de Physique des 2 Infinis', the 'Laboratoire des Matériaux Avancés' and the data centre 'Centre de Calcul de l'IN2P3' (CC-IN2P3). 

In the morning, we heard from speakers such as the community of Villeurbanne, who are celebrating their city being named ‘culture capital’ in 2022 (‘capitale française de la culture’), and from IN2P3 partners such as CERN and Université de Lyon.

We witnessed a wonderful talk by Magda Ericson, pioneering researcher in experimental physics at CNRS, who gave a fascinating insight into how it was to be one of the few female researchers in her field back in the day.

Anne Ealet, director at IP2i - the Institute of Physics of the 2 Infinities (‘Les 2 infinis’), a joint research initiative of which IN2P3 is part, took us deep into the fascinating world of subatomic physics, and we also learned more about the long-standing collaboration of IN2P3 with CERN (the IN2P3 data centre processes, amongst others, LHC data).

Director of the IN2P3 Centre de Calcul (CC-IN2P3) Pierre-Etienne Macchi shared some fascinating insights in the 50-year history of the ‘Centre de Calcul’ (data centre) attached to IN2P3 - we’re very happy to welcome him for a keynote at our annual EGI Conference on October 19th!

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In the afternoon, we were very lucky to receive a private tour of the CC-IN2P3 data centre. CC-IN2P3 designs and operates a mass storage system and mass data resources. It has two computer rooms (each with a surface area of 850m2) with several thousand servers and libraries enabling the storage of nearly 340 petabytes of data on magnetic tapes. Amongst other activities, it is one of the data centres that processes data generated by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. As a provider for the EGI High-Throughput Compute resources catalogue, several projects and collaborations are using CC-IN2P3 centre to process data and compute resources, such as the VIRGO experiment on gravitational waves, the BELLE II detector in Japan and several astrophysics projects such as the future LSST telescope, and CTA.

CC-IN2P3 also provides network capacity for several local actors, such as the universities and higher education centres in the region, and act as a node for regional internet capacity network Lyonex.  Over the last decade, CC-IN2P3 has faced a major increase in capacity needed, and therefore they are expanding their existing data centre with new and ultra modern servers - including a industrial standard cooling and capacity system.