Journées Européennes du Patrimoine 2024
On Saturday 21 September, the CC-IN2P3 will be opening its doors to the public for Journées Européennes du Patrimoine.
During this day, discover computing as you’ve never seen it before! Book your guided tour of the CC-IN2P3, where thousands of interconnected servers are used by the largest high-energy physics experiments. You can also visit the CC-IN2P3 computer museum, one of the few initiatives of its kind in France, and meet Daniel Charnay, one of the pioneers of the web in France, who will tell you how the centre hosted the first French web server. You can also attend lectures on the history of computing, wander through our Computing Discovery area, where fun and interactive workshops will be offered, and finally visit an exhibition that traces the evolution of computing resources in line with the needs of major physics experiments.
Find details of the activities on offer below.
Can’t make it? No problem, you can also join us live on Saturday on Twitch.
Visit the IN2P3 Computing Centre!
A national research infrastructure, the CC-IN2P3 is a CNRS computer processing centre that manages the computer data from the largest scientific experiments in high-energy physics. The CC-IN2P3 has two computer rooms housing several thousand servers and automated libraries capable of storing nearly 340 petabytes of data on magnetic tapes.
Come and discover this gem of the CNRS’s computing heritage, normally closed to the public, during a 45-minute guided tour (booking required).
Please note: these tours take place in an environment that can be noisy and subject to temperature variations.
Computer Museum
Come and visit one of the few initiatives of its kind in France, featuring a display of old equipment and exhibition panels. You will discover how computer technology dedicated to science has evolved over the years and how the needs of physicists have driven the development of new technologies that are now widely used.
You will also learn about the challenges overcome by the CNRS during the pioneering period of microcomputing, and how the first French web server was created on the Doua campus in Villeurbanne.
Lyon, birthplace of the French web
Did you know? The first French web server was created in Villeurbanne, near Lyon, in 1992 at the CC-IN2P3 (CNRS). At that time, web technology had just been created at CERN in Geneva and was intended for confidential use only by physicists for data exchange.
Come and discover how and why the web was born, how it differs from the Internet, and what the first French website looked like. Daniel Charnay, one of the pioneers of the web in France, will also be there to explain how, together with his colleague Wojciech Wojcik, he unwittingly contributed to the rise of a technology that is now used by everyone. This event is being held at the CC-IN2P3 computer museum, where the NeXTcube workstation used for the first web server is on display.
Conferences
The CC-IN2P3 is collaborating with various partners to offer you several conferences on computing and its history throughout the day.
- At 11:15 a.m., Walid Dabbous, a researcher at INRIA, will give a lecture entitled “History of the first Internet connection with the USA” simultaneously at the premises of our partner Terra Numerica and in the amphitheatre of the CC-IN2P3.
- At 2:15 p.m., Damien Boureille, engineer, consultant and member of the ACONIT computer science conservatory, will trace the “History of computing, from 1945 to the turn of the new millennium”.
- At 4:15 p.m., Pierre-Éric Mounier-Kuhn, researcher at the CNRS (Sorbonne University and Centre Alexandre Koyré), will give a lecture entitled “The IT industry and digital sovereignty: a long history”.
Computer Science Discovery Area
How does a computer work? How did the first calculating machines work? What is Moore’s Law? What is the binary system? How do you design an algorithm? How did the first video game work?
The computing centre is taking advantage of these days to introduce you to computing as you’ve never seen it before, through a series of fun workshops offered in collaboration with our partners Ambroise Thielley and Terra Numerica.
Exhibition: ‘From Calculation to Data: Computing, a Fundamental Component of the Scientific Process’
Created in the 1970s, the Computing Centre is the French data processing centre for the largest physics experiments, starting with those set up at CERN: on the SPS accelerator in 1980, on the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) in 1990, and in 2005 on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator. But also other experiment sites located around the world: from the BaBar experiment (Stanford, United States) on antimatter to the VIRGO experiment (Pisa, Italy) on gravitational waves, those installed on the TEVATRON (Batavia, United States) or, more recently, with the Euclid space telescope or the Rubin observatory in Chile.
Through a dozen exhibition panels, discover how the centre has developed its IT infrastructure in line with the needs of these experiments and thus contributed to several major scientific discoveries.