History

MUST mesocenter is the outcome of a study carried out jointly by the Annecy Laboratory for Particle Physics (LAPP) and the Savoie Mont Blanc University (USMB) in the early 2000s.

At this time, CERN embarked on European computing grid development projects (Datagrid then EGEE projects) to anticipate the massive influx of data following the start-up of the LHC scheduled for 2008. LAPP wanted to be associated with it, seeing this as an opportunity to locally create a computer platform that could provide both a privileged access to these data for its physicists and a powerful tool for their research.

At the same time, USMB was facing the need to renew its compute farm.

The two projects converged and, in 2005, the management team at LAPP and the presidency of USMB jointly responded to a call for tenders from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in order to finance the creation of a national mesocenter: the MUST project emerged. The convergence of multidisciplinary needs in data storage and scientific computing, particularly in numerical simulation, the pooling of resources and the optimization of skills, and the reduction of overall IT costs were all arguments in favor of MUST.

The computer platform was first hosted in LAPP computer room and inaugurated two years later, in 2007: it officially became a “Tier2” type grid node (according to the nomenclature of the European laboratory for particle physics), thus allowing scientists from this laboratory to analyze data from ATLAS and LHCb, two of the four major experiments based at CERN.

In 2013, MUST moved into the computer room of the brand new mecatronics building on USMB campus. Four years later, the computer and storage center received the “IN2P3 digital platform” label.