Mont-Terri underground laboratory

An international project

The Mont-Terri underground laboratory, managed by Swisstopo, is a research establishment near Saint-Ursanne in the canton of Jura in Switzerland. The laboratory, accessed by the Mont-Terri road tunnel, is conducting research into opalinus clay, the potential host rock for the planned storage of nuclear waste in Switzerland, in a deep geological layer.

Partners from Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan have come together to form the Mont-Terri Consortium to finance the programme and share its results.

Nearly 50 experiments are being conducted there using a large number of sensors spread over more than 800 boreholes, generating a large quantity of valuable data.

Secure Data

In June 2012, Sixense was entrusted with the definition, delivery and installation of a new data acquisition system based on the Geoscope instrumentation database.

The solution consists of a virtual platform with two physical servers. This choice ensures that the applications are always available. In the event of a physical server failure, the entire system switches to the available machine without interruption (high availability). To ensure a high quality of service, the database is also replicated to a remote site at Swisstopo’s offices in Bern. The acquisition system installed by Sixense is autonomous, secure, reliable and scalable.

The system, which has been operational since June 2014, has become the main tool for data acquisition, storage and monitoring of the underground laboratory. It allows partners from all over the world to connect to the database and run their experiments autonomously, using the Geoscope platform and a VPN connection.

Sixense teams also provide regular maintenance of the system and architecture, both remotely and on-site.