Donations and Funding
Lebanon joined the CERN family in 2016 through the signature of an International Cooperation Agreement. Following that milestone, four top Lebanese universities affiliated themselves to CMS.
Ever since, these universities have been sending some of their students to CERN to work on projects as part of their contribution to the CMS collaboration. This exchange of personnel coupled with academic excellence of Lebanese scientists has created an opportunity to further develop the cooperation between the country and CERN.
The HPC4L project was initiated as a result of this dynamic.
2021 marked a difficult time for the project, due to the various issues occurring in Lebanon. In order to salvage the project, CMS in partnership with Sharing Knowledge Foundation set up a fundraiser to keep the project arrive.
As the on-going economic crisis has dramatically reduced the available funds earmarked for the project at Universities, on the short term, the money collected through the fundraiser will be used to train the Lebanese specialists at CERN.
The French Embassy in Beirut will help support the travel costs of these professionals. We wish to thank all the donors who generously contributed to the fundraiser. We could not have done it without you.
HPC4L Funding
OGERO will be covering the infrastructure operation costs - electricity, UPS, Diesel power, cooling, and international internet bandwidth. In addition, OGERO will connect the partner universities to the HPC4L supercomputer through fibre optics
Partner Universities will contribute specialist personnel to take care of the system administration duties as well as a team of computer scientists called User Interface group. Their mission will be to assist researchers to format their data and algorithms so that they can be processed by the Supercomputer.
What Has CERN Donated?
Upon the agreement with Lebanon, CERN is providing the HPC4L project with repurposed hardware. In total CERN will be sending 144 Computing Servers that contain a total of 3,456 cores. In addition, CERN is supplying storage capacity by sending 24 Disk Servers that will provide a capacity of over 1 petabyte.
