On 19 December 2016 a ceremony at CERN marked the tenth donation of computing equipment to an academic institution, the Escuela Politécnica Nacional in Ecuador.

On this occasion, 72 servers, two racks and two network switches were donated to the Escuela Politécnica Nacional in Quito, Ecuador.  The donation included more than a thousand processor cores and eight disk servers providing about 400 terabytes of storage. Thanks to this equipment, the Escuela Politécnica Nacional will set-up a data centre which will become part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and will support the research projects of the two Ecuadorian universities who are currently contributing to the CMS experiment.  

Since 2012, CERN has regularly donated computing equipment that no longer meets its highly specific requirements on efficiency but is still more than adequate for less exacting environments. To date, a total of 1605 servers and 105 network switches have been donated to ten countries, namely Bulgaria, Egypt, Ghana, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, Senegal, Serbia and now Ecuador.

*CERN’s Director for Research and Computing, Eckhard Elsen (right) and Minister Arturo Cabrera (left), Deputy Permanent Representative of Ecuador to the United Nations and other International Organizations in Geneva, represented the Escuela Politécnica Nacional - EPN and the Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación - SENESCYT.