Large-scale scientific data processing will also take place in Latvia as scientists from the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) seek to discover new physics phenomena, as five Latvian educational and scientific institutions have pooled their high-performance computing or supercomputing resources into a common network that will be used by CERN for scientific calculations in the future. The opening of the «Latvia CERN CMS TIER2» Federated Computing Centre and the signing of the Memorandum of Cooperation between Latvia and CERN will take place on 5 June at 9.30 in the conference hall of Riga Technical University (RTU), Āzenes street 6. The Memorandum will be signed by the Minister of Finance Arvils Ašeradens, on behalf of the Minister of Education and Science, and CERN Director of Information Technology and Research Joachim Mnich.
«We are becoming part of the world's computing power - expanding our cooperation with CERN in the field of information technology and contributing to the great science project so that CERN scientists, especially our own researchers and students, can explore the mysteries of fundamental physics. This is something that only technologically advanced countries can do,» says Toms Torims, Latvia's representative at CERN and Head of the CERN National Contact Point at RTU.
RTU, the University of Latvia (UL), Rezekne Academy of Technologies, Ventspils University and the National Library of Latvia have already successfully joined their High Performance Computing (HPC) resources in the federated computing centre «Latvia CERN CMS TIER2». Thanks to investments by the Latvian government, the infrastructure has been put in place over four years to connect Latvia to the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid (WLCG), which brings together around 170 computing centres in more than 40 countries and provides computing resources to analyse and store data from LHC experiments. These processes take place at several levels at CERN. At the TIER0 level, data operations take place in CERN's data centre, at TIER1 in some very large global research institutes, and at TIER2, which Latvia joins, in the institutions with which CERN agrees to use supercomputer resources.
By linking its high-performance computing resources into a single federated TIER2 network, Latvia will be able to increase CERN's computing capacity and supercomputers in Riga and the regions will be able to perform calculations on elementary particle collisions in CERN's CMS (The Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment, which simulates the Big Bang at very high energy using the LHC, measuring the Universe to answer questions and discovering new physics phenomena. The CMS experiment is also home to Latvian scientists and PhD students from the joint RTU and LU programme «Particle Physics and Accelerator Technology», who are working on their theses at CERN.
«Latvia CERN CMS TIER2» partners have already tested the potential of their HPC resources by participating in the CERN-supported Folding@home initiative during Covid-19 and donating supercomputer resources to enable scientists in Latvia and around the world to do computational computing in the search for a cure to contain the virus. At that time, Latvia reached the top five of the Folding@home global rankings in five months, demonstrating its capacity for high-performance computing in a competition of more than 245,200 teams.
