The Wigner ALICE Analysis Facility

The ever growing increase of computing power necessary for the storage and data analysis of the HEP experiments at CERN requires performance optimization of the existing and planned IT resources. One of the main computing capacity consumers in the HEP software workflow is the data analysis. To optimize its resource use, the ALICE Collaboration has introduced the concept of Analysis Facility (AF) in its Run 3 computing model. The AFs are special computing centres with a combination of CPU and fast interconnected disk storage resources, allowing for rapid turnaround of analysis tasks on a subset of data. This in turn allows for optimization of the analysis process and the codes before the analysis is performed on the large data samples on the WLCG Grid. In this paper, the structure and the first benchmark tests of the Wigner AF are presented, a dedicated site, that has been designed for CERN ALICE data processing for the Run 3 period (2022-2025).