On April 9, 2026, the connection of the Institut de Física Corpuscular (IFIC) to CERN’s LHCONE (LHC Open Network Environment) network was completed.

LHCONE is an open network environment dedicated to connecting CERN with the centres that receive and process its data (Tiers 1/2/3), as well as interconnecting them, so that the transmission of the vast amounts of data generated by experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is as fast as possible. This is achieved by separating this data traffic from the regular network and avoiding the potential restrictions of the general Internet. In this way, IFIC, one of the Tier 2 centres in Spain, joins the already connected PIC, CIEMAT and UAM.

The connection to LHCONE provides researchers at IFIC and the UV working with the LHC and optimize transfer and analysis of massive volumes of data. This will enable scaling to higher bandwidths, lower latencies, elimination of interruptions in data transfers, and the creation of optimal communication paths between centres.

The connection to the LHCONE network is established via a 100 Gbps optical link from the IFIC data centre, located at the Universitat de València facilities in Paterna, to the RedIRIS TELMAD interconnection point in Madrid. This makes use of the University’s communications network infrastructure and the RedIRIS-NOVA network of the Spanish National Research and Education Network (NREN), RedIRIS, which is connected to other international academic networks and the European research network GÉANT. The configuration and design of the LHCONE connection involved technical staff from the three institutions: RedIRIS, UV and IFIC.