The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research) is a
government-funded research organisation, under the administrative authority of the French Ministry of Education and Research. CNRS’s annual budget represents a quarter of French public spending on civil research.
As the largest fundamental research organisation in Europe, CNRS carries out research in all fields of knowledge, through its seven CNRS Institutes: Institute of Chemistry (INC) ; Institute of Ecology and Environment (INEE) ; Institute of Physics (INP) ; Institute of Biological Sciences (INSB) ; Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (INSHS) ; Institute for Computer Sciences (INS2I) ; Institute for Engineering and Systems Sciences (INSIS) ; and its three national institutes: the National Institute for Mathematical Sciences (INSMI) ; the National Institute of Earth Sciences and Astronomy (INSU) ; and the National Institute
of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3).
IN2P3 is the institute of the CNRS concerned with this project. Founded in 1971, the aim of IN2P3 is to promote and unify research activities in the fields of nuclear physics, particle and astroparticle physics. It coordinates programmes within these fields on behalf of CNRS and the Universities, in partnership with CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission)..IN2P3 is responsible for running several major national facilities including particle accelerators and the CC-IN2P3 computing center. It supports several international facilities (e.g. CERN, EGO/VIRGO,…).
As contributions to the experiments in these research fields require significant
investments in terms of financing and personnel, the Institute took from the onset the structure of a limited number of large laboratories and Infrastructures or technological platforms in order to facilitate the pooling and optimisation of its resources and competencies. IN2P3 shares with INSU the support of some projects in High Energy Astronomy and Cosmology. Along with CC-IN2P3, CNRS, together with CEA-IRFU, fund in addition almost all national e‑Infrastructures for these domains, including smaller size regional computing infrastructures. The e‑Infrastructures provide data archive and computing resources also to research projects in other fields such as biology and life science, humanity and social science.