Transmission infrastructure connected to the Gran Sasso National Laboratories

The connectivity of the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories (LNGS) to the national GARR backbone has been significantly upgraded with the deployment of two new GARR Points of Presence (PoPs), located in both the surface and underground facilities, each connected at 200 Gbps.

Thanks to this important development, the LNGS network – one of the world’s largest and most important underground laboratories for particle physics – is now faster, more efficient, and fully integrated into the GARR national network.

Today, the Gran Sasso Laboratories host around 20 experiments conducted by international collaborations, primarily focused on studying the nature of neutrinos, the mechanisms of energy production in stars, and the search for dark matter particles.

As of now, each PoP is equipped with dual 100 Gbps links, and the infrastructure has the potential to reach 600 Gbps per channel, with 4.8 THz of available optical spectrum, ensuring the capacity to support future developments and increased traffic. This is a significant step forward, enabling researchers from scientific institutions around the world to benefit from state-of-the-art connectivity, in line with the most advanced scientific requirements.

This development is part of the wider rollout of GARR-T (Terabit), the national optical fibre backbone spanning approximately 20,000 km, connecting over 80 nodes with links from 100 to 800 Gbps, and offering a total capacity of 20 Tbps. GARR-T is the next-generation infrastructure for the education, research and cultural community in Italy, designed to deliver advanced services, network automation, and cutting-edge monitoring and management tools.

This intervention was made possible through PNRR funding within the framework of the ICSC project – the National Centre for Research in High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing. With this new connection, the Abruzzo segment of the network has now been completed, which, in addition to the two new PoPs, also includes an additional PoP in Teramo. ICSC is a unique project in Europe, aiming to build an ecosystem dedicated to all computing needs in research and industrial applications. Coordinated by the ICSC Foundation and funded by the European Union through the Next Generation EU programme, the project is organised around a central hub and several spokes, each covering different scientific domains.

GARR is one of the initiative’s partners and is involved – alongside INFN and CINECA – in the enhancement of the GARR-T network through Spoke 0, “Cloud infrastructure for supercomputing”, which is responsible for deploying and coordinating the national HPC and Big Data infrastructure, serving all thematic areas across the board.

Thanks to this new connection, the LNGS laboratories will benefit from a robust and scalable network infrastructure, with two outgoing routes from the underground labs along the tunnel towards Rome and Teramo, in line with the most advanced national architectures.