From the archive · 6 January 2012

elstir at CERN

Work at the Tier-0 in Geneva: the Higgs boson seminar, the data centre that processes the LHC, and web acceleration tests we brought home.

Last month, part of the Elstir team travelled to CERN, where we met up with our colleague Nil Valls for the Higgs Boson seminar and to run some final tests of the PHP web acceleration system that we will be rolling out progressively to our clients.

We also leave you some photographs of the Tier 0 data centre, control rooms, storage areas, and the ALICE and CMS detectors.

Three technicians in front of an open network rack in a data centre; one points at the equipment's modules

Aisle of rack cabinets with glass doors, KVM monitors and a red extinguisher trolley, with a visitors sign

Rows of racks seen from above with plastic containment covers and blue cooling ducts

Overhead view of rows of cabinets with transparent air-containment covers, labelled RC 37 and RC 38

CERN computing room seen from above, with multiple aisles of contained racks and raised flooring

Aisle of grey rack cabinets with a KVM monitor and keyboard and large blue ducts hanging from the ceiling

Aisle between dark data centre cabinets with cable trays on the ceiling and an extinguisher trolley at the far end

Narrow aisle between racks full of servers with multiple disk bays and blue LEDs lit

Row of open aluminium-frame racks packed with compute nodes, with an SQ05-SQ15 label at the end of the aisle.

Aisle of open racks with densely stacked servers and orange and red cabling over a raised floor.

Closed rack cabinets with glass doors, a flat monitor on the door and labels RJ 00-28 and RJ 01-29.

Long aisle of white rack cabinets; an open one reveals the empty black frame, with a keyboard and monitor on the door.

Close-up of dark grey cabinets with perforated mesh doors and looped cables over the top, labelled SP 20.

Row of black cabinets, one open to reveal internal orange and red cabling and network switches with green ports.

Rack packed with silver 1U servers in columns; on the left, labelled modules with green and blue status LEDs.

StorageTek tape cabinets with blue tops and touch panels, behind marking tape in the cold room

Hexagonal mesh door of a Spectra Logic T-Finity tape library with the loaders in the background

Interior view of a tape library: a wall of slots holding cartridges and a robotic arm in the aisle

Inside a tape library with the TeraPorter robot and rows of empty slot shelves receding in perspective

Two men shake hands in front of CERN's Globe of Science, a wooden sphere under a blue sky

Racks behind glass doors labelled 'CERN Internet Exchange Point' and 'Backbone', with routers and fans

Aisle between open racks with yellow rails and dense orange fibre; a blue column at the far end of the CIXP

Router with circular fan modules behind glass doors, with cabling and reflections of people

Today, in 2026

We came back from that work with a validated PHP web acceleration system that we ended up deploying on our hosting platform — and with photographs of a place like no other. CERN does not just process the LHC: it is where the World Wide Web was born, and its CIXP (CERN Internet eXchange Point) is one of the longest-standing traffic exchange points in Europe. Several of the photos are of that IXP.

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