History

The MUST mesocenter is the result of a vision shared by the Annecy Laboratory for Particle Physics (LAPP) and the University of Savoie Mont Blanc (USMB) in the early 2000s.

KEY MILESTONES & FIGURES

2002

LAPP joins the DATAGRID project coordinated by CERN, forerunner of EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe) and LCG (LHC Computing Grid), with the goal of providing researchers with high-performance tools and privileged access to LHC data.

2005

Response to the ministerial call for tenders – MUST is created under the impetus of LAPP management and the presidency of the University of Savoie, today Université Savoie Mont Blanc, which sought to equip its research laboratories with high-performance computing resources. MUST is officially recognized as a national mesocenter.

2007

Official inauguration of MUST as mesocenter of the University of Savoie, also a Tier 2 site of the LCG grid for processing data from the ATLAS and LHCb experiments.

2010

MUST becomes a computing and storage node for CTA (CTACG).

2012

MUST offers an Infiniband solution enabling HPC-type computing (high-performance parallel computing).

2013

MUST moves into a new dedicated computer room (170 m²) in the Maison de la Mécatronique of the University of Savoie.

2015

The University of Savoie is renamed; MUST becomes mesocenter of Université Savoie Mont-Blanc and introduces GPU computing capabilities (graphics processing units).

2016

MUST is among the most important global Tier 2 sites (Nucleus ATLAS) providing storage space for ATLAS.

2017

MUST is labeled as an IN2P3 digital platform.

At that time, CERN had launched European computing grid development projects (Datagrid then EGEE) to anticipate the massive influx of data expected from the LHC startup in 2008. LAPP wanted to be part of this effort, seeing it as an opportunity to create a local computing platform that would provide its physicists with privileged access to the data and a powerful tool for their research.

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

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

The computing platform was inaugurated two years later, in 2007, on LAPP premises and officially became a “Tier2” grid node (according to the nomenclature of the European laboratory for particle physics), enabling scientists from the laboratory to analyze data from ATLAS and LHCb, two of the four major experiments at CERN.

In 2013, MUST moved into the brand new computer room of the Maison de la Mécatronique (Mechatronics House) on the USMB campus. Four years later, the computing and storage center was officially labeled an “IN2P3 digital platform.”