The framework of the third phase of openlab was similar to the previous ones, with the aim of hosting a few major projects with a particular focus on technologies and services relevant to CERN as the WLCG Tier-0 as well as other nodes in the Grid. The technical activities are organised in different domains of competence:

Through the Automation and Controls Competence Centre (ACCC), CERN and Siemens collaborated on security, as well as the opening of automation tools towards software engineering and handling of large environments.

In partnership with Oracle, the Database Competence Centre (DCC) focused on items such as data distribution and replication, monitoring and infrastructure management, highly available database services, application design, as well as automatic failover and standby databases.

One focus of Networking Competence Centre (NCC) was CINBAD, a research project launched by CERN and HP ProCurve to understand the behaviour of large computer networks (10’000+ nodes) in High Performance Computing or large Campus installations. Since February 2010, a new openlab team under the codename WIND (Wireless Infrastructure Network Deployment) has carried out research and provided new algorithms, guidelines and solutions to support the deployment and operation of the Wi-Fi infrastructure at CERN.

The Platform Competence Centre (PCC) focused on PC-based computing hardware and related software. In collaboration with Intel, it addressed important fields such as thermal optimisation, application tuning and benchmarking. It also had a strong emphasis on teaching.

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