The U.S. ATLAS Northeast Tier 2 Center (NET2) is one of four U.S. centralized computing centers that support the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, an international effort to shed light on the behavior of fundamental particles, forces, the Higgs boson, dark matter, and possible new physics. Its mission is to provide the large-scale computing and storage resources needed to process, store, distribute, and analyze the enormous volumes of data generated by ATLAS.

NET2 is operated at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) through a collaboration led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with contributions from partner institutions including Boston University and Harvard University.

As part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), NET2 helps store and analyze ATLAS data alongside a global network of computing facilities that collectively provide hundreds of thousands of processing cores and massive distributed storage capacity. The center supports both the analysis of real collision data and the production of large-scale simulations used to interpret experimental results.

A distinguishing feature of NET2 is its integration with the Northeast Storage Exchange (NESE), a large-scale storage platform developed in collaboration with Harvard University that provides robust data storage and movement capabilities for ATLAS and other data-intensive scientific projects.