The Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics (Nikhef) is under constant pressure to increase the performance of its HPC capacity as the volume of raw data it needs to process continues to expand. To meet the task, Nikhef wanted to work with a technology provider whose products could maximise the efficiency and calculation power of the server processors per euro invested.

The Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics (Nikhef) studies the interaction and structure of all elementary particles and fields—at the smallest distance scale and the highest attainable energy. Its work—as part of a global research programme involving the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland—helped confirm the existence of the Higgs boson particle, one of the universe’s elementary building blocks. The same computing infrastructure used for the Higgs research was also involved in the Nobel-Prize winning confirmation of gravitational waves.