Lab Repurposes a Former Particle Accelerator to Become a Scientific Data Center Facility

We’re all about finding new ways to save energy and money at the Department of Energy (DOE), especially when it comes to our facilities. But it’s not usually on such a large scale. DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory just completed a facility “repurposing” project. It turned a particle accelerator that hosted Nobel Prize-winning research into one of the largest storehouses of scientific data in the world. The 59,000 square feet of the former National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) facility had been unused after its successor, the NSLS-II, opened. Recently, the lab completely renovated it as the home for Brookhaven’s Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC).

The $74.85 million “Core Facility Revitalization (CFR) Project” was sponsored by the Science Laboratories Infrastructure program of the DOE’s Office of Science. The renovation was a cost-effective and smart solution to a space shortage that took advantage of a robustly constructed facility. It minimized the construction waste going to landfills and reduced the need for new raw building materials. The team completed it on time and within budget, while meeting rigorous federal sustainability standards for both buildings and data centers. Perhaps most impressively, the team constructed it through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The project delivered a modern and highly functional environment for researchers at Brookhaven Lab. It connects research across DOE and around the world. It will allow scientists to analyze tremendous quantities of data to enable advances in physics, biology, climate, and energy research. 

The SDCC is supporting data storage for scientists working on a number of major projects. These projects at DOE Office of Science user facilities at Brookhaven Lab include:

The SDCC is also supporting experiments elsewhere in the United States and around the world. These include the ATLAS experiment to understand the basic building blocks of matter at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe and Belle-II at the SuperKEKB particle accelerator in Japan. The SDCC team is also planning for the future. The center will provide data storage for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and the Electron-Ion Collider. 

With the support of the recently completed data center, DOE’s Office of Science is driving discovery science forward. 

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