Most of the $51 million from the National Science Foundation will leave the UNL campus, Bloom said, but some will be put to use in Lincoln to support the project.
Several upgrades will take place at the Dutch Computer Center, which stores copies of some of the data generated through the experiments at CERN and expands computing capabilities to physicists trying to determine what it all means.
Carl Lundstedt, professor of physics who runs power grids at the Dutch Computing Center, said Red, the supercomputer supporting the CMS project underneath NU’s South Stadium, is capable of storing seven petabytes of data.
In addition to maintaining a cache of the vast amount of information generated at CERN, Red also works with other Tier 2 computing sites as a kind of hybrid between the grid and Amazon Web Services, Lundstedt said.
“If you’re a physicist working with data, you can give Red a job and never know it,” Lundstedt said, adding that UNL is continuing to work on an upgrade. and overhauling supercomputers as new technology becomes available.
In addition to directing funds for further research efforts across the United States, Bloom said UNL will also be involved in further advancing the science that will be done at CERN in the coming years.
