Towards the High-Luminosity LHC: the GARR network is ready for the challenge
As of yesterday, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has been shut down to make way for the transformation work leading to the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), an upgrade of the LHC scheduled to come into operation around 2030.
This marks the beginning of a crucial phase for one of the world's most important scientific projects. The upgrade will increase one of the key parameters of particle accelerators — luminosity — by up to a factor of ten, resulting in a substantial increase in the number of particle collisions and, consequently, in the volume of data available for research.
The High-Luminosity LHC will represent an unprecedented step change. Thanks to new detectors and increased luminosity, the experiments are expected to produce between four and eight times as much data as they do today, starting in the very first years of operation. This will pose significant challenges not only for scientific computing but also for the networks responsible for transporting this information reliably and efficiently.
The central role of network infrastructure
The capacity of network infrastructure remains essential throughout this lengthy upgrade period. Scientific collaborations will continue to analyse the vast archive of data collected over years of operation, while data transfers between CERN and computing centres around the world will continue without interruption.
In Italy alone, during the first six months of 2026, traffic exchanged between the various Tier centres and CERN reached approximately 300 PB, representing a 49% increase compared with the same period the previous year.
To support these data transfers, the Italian research network currently relies on two 400 Gbps links to the European GÉANT backbone, 400 Gbps connections to the INFN CNAF Tier-1 data centre, and 100 Gbps links to the Tier-2 centres.
The network's performance has also been demonstrated through the deployment of innovative international solutions. One notable example is the connection between CERN and INFN CNAF, capable of reaching a capacity of 1.6 Tbps with a latency of just 9.5 milliseconds, thanks to multi-domain shared spectrum technology jointly implemented by GARR and GÉANT. This achievement confirms both the high quality of the Italian infrastructure and its seamless integration with Europe's research network.
A long-standing collaboration
For more than twenty years, GARR has been a participant in the LHC Optical Private Network (LHCOPN), the international network dedicated to transporting data from CERN's experiments. LHCOPN connects CERN with the world's major computing centres, enabling the continuous transfer of the data required for analysis by the international scientific community.
Italy plays a leading role through INFN CNAF in Bologna, one of the thirteen Tier-1 centres of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), where experimental data are stored, processed and redistributed to thousands of researchers worldwide.
In recent years, GARR has further strengthened this capability through the technological enhancement and expansion of GARR-T, its new-generation network infrastructure. Designed to provide greater transmission capacity, resilience and flexibility, GARR-T is built on an open, programmable architecture capable of supporting the continuous growth in traffic generated by major scientific infrastructures.
Through GARR-T, its participation in LHCOPN, and its collaboration with GÉANT and the international research and education networking community, GARR continues to play a strategic role in ensuring that researchers have the reliable connectivity and advanced infrastructure needed to support the next era of high-energy physics.
Approfondimenti
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