The COMPASS Computing Farm project

The COMPASS experiment at CERN is building a large facility for off-line computing in close collaboration with the CERN IT division: the COMPASS Computing Farm. The motivations, the experience, and the plans for deploying a 2,000 Spec INT95 computing farm are discussed. The main technical points are the use of Intel-based Linux PCs for both the I/O and the CPU intensive tasks, and the use of an object data base to store all the data.