CERN openlab - CERN openlab

CERN and leading ICT companies collaborate through CERN openlab to tackle future challenges

Petya Georgieva — Thu, 28 May 2015 11:53:05 +0000

Geneva, 28 May 2015.

CERN openlab¹, a unique public-private partnership between CERN² and leading ICT companies, is now entering an exciting new phase and is expanding to include other public research organisations for the first time. A special event will be held at CERN to mark this occasion.

CERN openlab’s mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions to be used by the scientific community. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the most complex machines ever built and requires cutting-edge ICT solutions both to control its operations and to analyse the vast amounts of data produced by the physics experiments. During Run 2 of the LHC, it is expected that the CERN Data Centre will store more than 30 petabytes of data per year from the experiments, which is equivalent to about 1.2 million Blu-ray discs, or 250 years of HD video.

Testing in this demanding environment provides the companies collaborating in CERN openlab with valuable feedback on their products, while enabling CERN to assess the merits of new technologies in their early stages of development for possible future use.

Huawei, Intel, Oracle, and Siemens are all partner companies for the new phase of CERN openlab. Brocade, Cisco, IDT, Rackspace, and Seagate are contributors, while Yandex is an associate member. The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research are the first new public research organisations to join CERN openlab.

“CERN openlab plays a vital role in ensuring that members of CERN’s scientific community have access to the very latest ICT solutions to help them do their ground-breaking work and further our understanding of the universe” says Alberto Di Meglio, Head of CERN openlab. “CERN openlab also aids innovation by enabling continuous exchange of information and expertise between research and industry. Technologies targeted at the needs of CERN today are likely to become mainstream products for enterprise — or even consumer markets — just a few years down the line.”

Di Meglio continues: “Our expansion to include other public research organisations makes this a very exciting time for us all. By pooling our knowledge and expertise, we aim to address the common challenges faced by large-scale research laboratories in the era of big data.”

‘Open Day’ event

CERN openlab is organising a first-of-its-kind ‘Open Day’ event for 10 June 2015. The event will be held at CERN and will be an opportunity to learn more about the work carried out through CERN openlab to help tackle the challenges faced by the scientific community.

Journalists wishing to attend the event are invited to contact CERN openlab using the details below. A press lunch will also be held during the event at 12:40 CEST. Representatives of both CERN and the collaborating companies will be available to answer your questions.

Contacts:

CERN Press Office

press.office@cern.ch

+41 22 767 34 32

+41 22 767 21 41

Andrew Purcell, CERN openlab communications

andrew.purcell@cern.ch

+41 22 766 22 87

Footnote(s)

1. CERN openlab was created in 2001 and is now entering its fifth three-year phase (2015-2017). This phase addresses new topics crucial to the CERN scientific programme. The topics have been defined over the past 18 months, through discussion and collaborative analysis of requirements between the companies collaborating in CERN openlab and representatives of both CERN and the LHC experiments.

2. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. Its headquarters are in Geneva. Its Member States are currently: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a Candidate for Accession and Serbia is an Associate Member State in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission, JINR and UNESCO have Observer status.

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CERN openlab

CERN openlab publishes a whitepaper on future IT challenges in scientific research

Melissa Gaillard — Wed, 21 May 2014 15:29:16 +0000

Geneva, 22 May 2014. CERN openlab¹, the public-private partnership between CERN, leading IT companies and research institutes, released today a whitepaper on future IT challenges in scientific research to shape its upcoming three-year phase starting in 2015.

96% of our universe is still unknown and the challenges ahead for the scientific community are striking. More than ever, computing plays a critical role in helping uncover our universe’s mysteries. Scientific research has seen a dramatic rise in the amount and rate of production of data collected by instruments, detectors and sensors in the recent years. The LHC detectors at CERN²produce a staggering one petabyte of data per second, a figure that will increase during the next LHC run starting in 2015. New international research infrastructures are being deployed and are expected to produce comparable—or even greater—amounts of data in various scientific domains, such as neurology, radio astronomy or genetics, and with instruments as diverse as Earth observation satellites, high-performance genomic sequencers, neutron diffractometers or X-ray antennas. More than ever, collaboration will play a vital role in enabling discoveries.

In this context, CERN openlab together with a number of European laboratories, such as EMBL-EBI, ESA, ESRF, ILL, and researchers from the Human Brain Project, as well as input from leading IT companies, have published a whitepaper defining the ambitious challenges covering the most crucial needs of IT infrastructures in domains such as data acquisition, computing platforms, data storage architectures, compute provisioning and management, networks and communication, and data analytics. A number of use cases in different scientific and technological fields are described for each of the six major areas of investigation.

Continuous collaboration between the research infrastructures and IT companies is more critical than ever to make sure scientific objectives and technological roadmaps are aligned. In the current CERN openlab phase, Huawei, Intel, Oracle, Siemens are openlab partners, while Rackspace is a contributor and Yandex an associate. This whitepaper, which results from six months of reflection among IT experts and scientists, represents an exciting context for the CERN openlab public-private partnership in the years to come. It sets the goals, the technical expertise and identifies educational programs required, providing opportunities for future collaboration among CERN, other European laboratories, international scientific projects and leading IT companies to push the limits even further in support of many more years of outstanding scientific discoveries.

Further information

CERN openlab website: www.cern.ch/openlab

Whitepaper pdf link: https://zenodo.org/record/8765

Link to the press release on the CERN website: http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2014/05/cern-openlab-publishes-w...

Contact

CERN openlab Communications Officer, melissa.gaillard@cern.ch
+41 (0)22 767 50 49

Footnotes:

CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading IT companies. Its mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions for the worldwide LHC community and collaborating research institutes. Within this framework, CERN provides access to its engineering experience and its complex IT infrastructure, in some cases extended to research institutes worldwide. Testing in demanding and extreme environments pushes technology to its limits, providing the IT industry partners with valuable feedback on their products, while allowing CERN and the collaborating research laboratories to assess the merits of new technologies in their early stages of development for possible future use.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its member states are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Serbia is an associate member in the pre-stage to membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have observer status.

Press Release pdf:

CERN_openlab_PR_22052014.pdf

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CERN openlab

New phase of CERN openlab to tackle exascale IT challenges for science

Morag Hickman — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:05:58 +0000

Geneva, 9 May 2012. The fourth phase of CERN openlab was officially launched during a meeting of its board of sponsors taking place at CERN¹ on 8 and 9 May. CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading information technology companies HP, Intel, Oracle, Siemens, with contribution from Huawei for this new phase. Its mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions to be used by the worldwide community working on LHC data.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, generates hundreds of millions of particle collisions each second. To record, store and analyse these vast amounts of collisions present a massive data challenge: the LHC produces roughly 20 million Gigabytes of data each year.

CERN openlab was created more than 10 years ago, to develop innovative, advanced IT systems required to cope with the unprecedented computing challenges of the LHC. It brings together the efforts of science and industry, working at the cutting-edge of research to ever expand technological boundaries. This collaborative framework also offers a neutral ground for companies to collaborate on common projects and develop synergies.

The third phase of CERN openlab was officially closed during the meeting of partners. The assembly reviewed key achievements of the projects carried out, and agreed on their positive impact on the development of the Grid and computing services, which underpin the LHC. The work was organized into four competence centres: Automation and Controls with Siemens, Database with Oracle, Networking with HP, and Platform with Intel.

During the meeting, Rolf Heuer, CERN Director General, stated that “The synergy that CERN openlab creates with leading IT companies is highly fruitful and I therefore thank all CERN openlab partners and contributors for their continued support. During the next three years, CERN is preparing the LHC for operating at higher energy and luminosity. This fourth phase will be instrumental in addressing the increased computing challenges in an innovative way.”

The fourth phase will address new topics crucial to the CERN scientific programme, such as cloud computing, business analytics, the next generation of hardware, and security for the myriads of network devices. The industry investment over the three years of the fourth phase represents more than eight million Swiss Francs.

Frédéric Hemmer, Head of the IT Department at CERN added: “In 2011, the LHC experiments took data at rates and volumes exceeding the most optimistic forecasts. In such a demanding environment, agility is a key requirement for the computing infrastructure but also a challenge in itself. In this context, the collaboration with the IT industry in the CERN openlab framework is an outstanding catalyst to sustain a steady stream of innovative solutions. ”

The four partner companies summarized the projects’ results of the third phase and presented plans for CERN openlab IV.

“As one of the world’s most demanding and sophisticated IT infrastructures, CERN is an ideal environment for the two projects HP is conducting through openlab: the first is focused on developing algorithms and strategies for large scale wireless deployment that optimize network resource management; the second project intends to leverage CERN’s infrastructure and experience with large scale data acquisition networks by developing network virtualization solutions using OpenFlow and Software-defined Networking technologies. The first project (wireless) is in its final phase, while the second project (OpenFlow) is a new openlab IV project”, stated Bill Johnson, Senior Director of Research and Development for HP Networking.

“We are very proud to have been a part of CERN openlab since 2003. The renewed agreement marks a decade of joint research by the two organizations,” said Christian Morales, Intel Vice President and General Manager, Europe, Middle East, Africa. “The CERN team is conducting impressive research. We are honoured to be continuously challenged by CERN to improve performance, energy efficiency and security solutions in our products, technologies and solutions. CERN openlab is strategic in our European R&D network, Intel Labs Europe.”

“As we increase and strengthen our focus in the Research Industry segment, with our new Research Industry solutions, CERN openlab IV will offer Oracle the opportunity to continue to develop, test and validate our technology,” says Monica Marinucci, EMEA Director for Research at Oracle. “Research data management and analytics as well as virtualization and enterprise management solutions will be the focus areas for Oracle to best contribute to the success of the Laboratory. We are proud to renew our commitment to openlab, particularly this year in which Oracle and CERN celebrate their 30th year of fruitful collaboration.”

According to Thomas Hahn from Siemens Corporate Technology: “Recent CERN openlab contributions over the past three years successfully focused on improving security as well as handling huge amounts of data. Cooperation in the fourth phase will address the aggregation of this data into business intelligence and business analytics, and thus lead to further improvements in the area of high-performance industrial control.”

Huawei have joined CERN openlab IV as a contributor for a year and participated for the first time in the meeting. Huawei’s representative, James Hughes, Cloud Storage Chief Architect, stated: “I am proud Huawei and CERN are jointly working on innovative cloud storage system solutions allowing scaling and providing high performance.”

Bob Jones, Head of CERN openlab, thanked all participants and concluded: “CERN openlab has established itself as a reference thanks to the excellent relationship and on-going commitment of all partners and contributors during the past 11 years. The combined knowledge and dedication of the engineers from CERN and the companies have produced remarkable results. The launch of this fourth phase is an exciting time for CERN openlab and I am confident that we will be equally successful in the future.”

Further information:

CERN openlab website: http://www.cern.ch/openlab

CERN openlab video link: http://test-static-05.web.cern.ch/resources/videos

Video News Release link: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1428499

Contact:

CERN Press Office, press.office@cern.ch
+41 (0)22 767 34 32
+41 (0)22 767 21 41

CERN openlab Communications Officer, melissa.gaillard@cern.ch

+41 (0)22 767 50 49

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CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Press Release pdf:

CERN_openlab_PR_09052012.pdf

Released by:

CERN openlab