CERN, (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), is the world’s largest particle physics research laboratory. Here, scientists and researchers operate six particle accelerators that are among the largest scientific instruments ever built. In these devices, elementary particles are accelerated to tremendously high energies and then smashed together. These collisions, recorded by particle detectors, give a glimpse of matter, as it was, moments after the Big Bang.

Although CERN’s IT infrastructure had previously coped with the networking demands made of it on a day-to-day basis, it was well aware that it needed to reassess its needs as a result of the heavy demands that the Grid would eventually place on its network environment. This whitepaper examines the solution it finally chose to help connect the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, and to network 600 PCs in the world’s largest scientific computing grid.