March 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the LHC Optical Private Network (LHCOPN), the first global collaboration dedicated to managing and transferring the vast amounts of data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN in Geneva.

The anniversary was celebrated at the 54th LHCOPN-LHCONE meeting in Manchester, where the achievements of two decades of data management and distribution were highlighted.

Designed in the early 2000s, LHCOPN began operating a few years before the LHC started collecting data. Its goal was to efficiently transmit the enormous datasets from the LHC's particle detectors to Tier-0 (CERN) and various Tier-1 sites worldwide for storage and initial analysis. Initially, the connection to CERN was limited to 1 Gbps, which was insufficient for the expected data load. From the outset, LHCOPN was designed as a dedicated, robust network with 10 Gbps links centred around CERN.

GARR has been a key contributor to this initiative. For instance, Karbol (Karlsruhe-Bologna), the precursor to LHCOPN, was the first transnational connection experiment between Italy (INFN-CNAF) and Germany (KIT/EPT), facilitated by the Italian (GARR) and German (DFN) networks via the European GÉANT network.

LHCOPN stands as a testament to the power of international collaboration and the crucial role of networking and computing in supporting large-scale scientific experiments with extreme data handling requirements around the world.

Over the years, the network has evolved to meet the growing bandwidth demands of the experiments and integrate additional sites. From the initial 10 Gbps connections, LHCOPN now features 400 Gbps links, such as the one managed by GARR to connect the INFN-CNAF Tier-1 in Bologna with CERN. The network traffic, which has seen a significant increase in connections between different Tiers, has grown from the initial 3.2 Gbps to 945 Gbps.

The topology and bandwidth capacity of LHCOPN in 2005

The topology and bandwidth capacity of LHCOPN in 2025

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