Canadian ATLAS Tier-1 Centre

This is the home page for ATLAS Canada Tier-1 Centre Grid computing resources.  You may also wish to visit the home page of the ATLAS group at TRIUMF.

The Canadian ATLAS Tier-1 Data Centre is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF), with significant in-kind contributions from TRIUMF and from the computing industry in the form of discounts on hardware purchases.

One of a dozen Tier-1 centres in national computing facilities around the world, the TRIUMF Data Centre will participate in the storage and analysis of petabytes of data generated by the ATLAS detector at CERN in Switzerland.  ATLAS is one of 4 major detectors housed along the 27 km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring, located on the outskirts of Geneva.

Networking resources for the TRIUMF facility are provided by CANARIE, BCNET and HEPNET Canada  - there is a 10 Gbit/s dedicated lightpath connecting TRIUMF to CERN, with a backup 10 GBit/s lightpath setup in a failover configuration.  Other Tier-1 centres have high-speed connections to the TRIUMF centre to facilitate mirroring of important data.

Tier-2 centres located at universities and research labs in Canada are also linked into the higher level national Tier-1 centre at TRIUMF via dedicated multi Gbit/s lightpaths.   Much of the data analysis will be carried out by Scientists working at the Tier-2 centres.