CERN openlab - Automation and Controls

Board of Sponsors meeting launches CERN openlab's next phase

Morag Hickman — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:08:31 +0000

Wednesday, 9 May, 2012

On the 8^th and 9^th of May, the CERN openlab Board of Sponsors gathered at CERN to officially close phase III of the collaboration, and to launch its fourth phase, which will run through 2012 to the end of 2014.

Welcomed by the Head of CERN openlab, Bob Jones, delegates from industry member companies and CERN management joined CERN openlab staff to review the third phase. Various talks highlighted key achievements, and celebrated the positive impact on the development of Grid and computing services which underpin the LHC. They also looked forward to future plans for development.

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

Rolf Heuer, CERN Director General chaired a Round-Table discussion at the end of the day with the heads of delegations from the openlab partner companies, HP, Intel, Oracle, Intel, and Huawei as a contributor for a year, and thanked all CERN openlab partners and contributors for their continued support. He emphasized that the fourth phase of CERN openlab will be instrumental in addressing the growing computing challenges posed by increases in LHC luminosity and energy in future.

The second day brought an opportunity to widen the scope of the meeting, showcasing the scientific diversity of CERN, future needs of the experiments, and exploring how CERN openlab fits into the broader picture.

CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolluci spoke on the scientific programme of CERN, Pierre Vande Vyvre, Project Leader of the ALICE Data Acquisition Project, gave an experiment’s-eye-view of CERN’s computing needs and how they will change as the LHC’s energy and luminosity increase. A key development in processing data from the LHC and its experiments will be the creation of the CERN' s remote data centre, plans for which were outlined in a talk by Wayne Salter, Computing Facilities Group Leader in the CERN IT Department.

Bernd Panzer-Steindel, CTO and resource manager in the CERN computer centre, turned the focus towards strategic direction outilining how CERN is moving towards an agile infrastructure making sure of reasoned virtualisation. This presentation was followed-up by a discussion and wrap-up session. Bob Jones 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.”

The press release is available to you, as well as a video presenting the CERN openlab activities and the group picture taken at the occasion of this first CERN openlab IV annual Board of Sponsors meeting, in the presence of the CERN Director-General, the partners, and the openlab team members.

Details of the event are available to delegates on Indico.

Log Analysis and Classification of CERN Control Systems

Mary Touranakou — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 14:25:38 +0000

Date published:

Monday, 1 September, 2014

Document type:

Summer student report

Author(s):

Z. D. Kassabov

Project Specification: CERN is running several large WinCC OA distributed sys- tems, each of them counting ~100-150 computers and several thousands of processes. The log files currently produced by these processes are only looked at very seldom to debug prob- lems. The project will consist of introducing a modern log analysis tool to analyze these log files in real time and inform the operators/experts of possible problems. The tools will also be used to extract statistics and produce reports about the control systems. The selected tool will be Elastic Search with Kibana. Abstract: This project has consisted in examining different alternatives for monitoring and ana- lyzing the log messages produced by the control system software using at CERN. Its main accomplishments have been a performance measurement of the Logstash tool un- der both realistic and extreme load scenarios, the development of a flexible and powerful performance testing tool, and the proposal of a system that automatically determines the importance that a given log message might have for an operator based on a Bayesian filter.

Report on ZENODO:

Document on ZENODO

Open Innovation 2.0 - Interview with Bob Jones, Head of CERN’s openlab project

Mary Touranakou — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 15:30:27 +0000

Date Published:

Tuesday, 21 May, 2013

CERN’s Bob Jones covers the openlab project to enable data-intensive solutions for the Large Hadron Collider

Siemens Visit at CERN

Mary Touranakou — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 10:57:59 +0000

Date:

Thursday, 5 February, 2015 - 10:00 to 16:00

Location:

CERN Reception

Visit of Wolfgang Heuring, Head of Siemens Research and Technology Centre, Thomas Hahn, Corporate Technology - Research and Technology Centre at Siemens Corporation and the press representatives Lukas Weber from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Yvonne Debrunner from Schweizerische Depeschenagentur, Peter Kellerhoff from VDI Nachrichten, Hubertus Breuer from Freelance, Florian Martini and Benno Estermann from the Siemens Press Office.

Calendar

A glimpse of the CERN openlab summer student programme 2014

Mary Touranakou — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 10:51:19 +0000

Date Published:

Friday, 9 January, 2015

The 2014 students present the CERN openlab summer student programme.

Making sense of data streams: Complex Event Processing for Controls Applications

Mary Touranakou — Mon, 10 Nov 2014 08:41:46 +0000

Date published:

Monday, 1 September, 2014

Document type:

Summer student report

Author(s):

K. B. Sokol

Project Specification: CERN is currently investigating the usage of data analysis technologies to study the behaviour of the industrial control systems. An activity related to these analysis is using Complex Event Processing (CEP) tools to classify a real abnormal behaviour from one generated by a human intervention on the system. In this study the Complex Event Processing classification is run over signals produced by variety of sensors and simulators. The selected tools is Esper. Presented here work consists of installing chosen tool, and developing the classification system with it to address given above merit. Abstract: This project aims at building a tool to process live streams of data produced by various sensors and artificial generators. To this end, a Java code is written, which uses Esper Complex Event Processing package to: receive data feeds, apply user defined rules and filters, and pass the resulting information to a clustering framework. The last step employs Affinity Propagation based clustering algorithm, which choice is motivated by its dynamic adaptation to number of clusters in the data. This is key feature in data streaming scenario as the number of clusters can evolve with time. Furthermore, [Zhang et al., 2013] have documented overall good performance of Affinity Propagation in cases of live data analysis. Finally, presented here approach is compared and contrasted against static clustering algorithms applied to data gathered from streams incoming over one run of the program, followed by in-depth results analysis.

Report on ZENODO:

Document on ZENODO

Big Data in action for the LHC Industrial Control System

Mary Touranakou — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 12:10:15 +0000

Date published:

Wednesday, 7 May, 2014

Document type:

Poster

Author(s):

F. Tilaro

A. Voitier

M. Gonzalez Berges

Event published at:

CERN openlab Board of Sponsors 2014 - Poster Session

CERN openlab Board of Sponsors 2014 (registered users only)

Technical document file:

Data.Analytics.on_.Control.Data-POSTER-_BoS_2014.pdf

Science and Society: the Impact of Computing at CERN on Society

Melissa Gaillard — Wed, 28 May 2014 09:09:15 +0000

Date Published:

Wednesday, 28 May, 2014

Lecture in English, with simultaneous interpreting into French

CERN is often referred to as the place “where the web was born”. The world-wide-web has fundamentally changed society and launched a wave of new global industries. The world-wide-web happened because there was a specific problem that was seen as an Information Technology (IT) challenge by its inventors. As the scientific programme of CERN has progressed, new IT challenges have been faced such as how to handle the mind-boggling amount of data that is produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Being able to face those challenges has contributed to the success of the LHC and the discovery of the Higgs particle. This public lecture will explore some of those challenges, how they have been tackled and what impact they are having beyond physics and ultimately on society as a whole.

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Conférence en anglais – traduction simultanée en français

On parle souvent du CERN comme le « berceau du web ». Le web a changé notre société en profondeur et a contribué à la création de nouvelles industries globales. Le web a vu le jour parce que ses créateurs avaient un problème précis à résoudre qu’ils ont considéré comme un défi de la technologie de l’information. Le programme scientifique du CERN s'est depuis développé, créant de nouveaux défis tels que la gestion de la montagne de données produites par le Grand collisionneur de hadrons (LHC). La capacité de faire face à ces questions a contribué au succès du LHC et à la découverte de la particule de Higgs. Cette conférence publique abordera certaines de ces questions, la façon dont elles ont été résolues et l’impact qu’elles ont au-delà de la physique, et en fin de compte, sur la société entière.

Link to external video:

https://cds.cern.ch/record/1703692

Science and Society: the Impact on Computing at CERN on Society

Melissa Gaillard — Wed, 28 May 2014 09:03:00 +0000

Author(s):

B. Jones

Date presented:

Thursday, 22 May, 2014

Event presented at:

CERN celebrating 60 years of science for peace in 2014, CERN

To know more about this event and the programme, please check this page

Presentation file:

2014-05-22-ImpactITsociety-Jones-final.pdf

Video link:

Video of the talk and slides

CERN openlab Whitepaper on Future IT Challenges in Scientific Research

Melissa Gaillard — Wed, 21 May 2014 15:43:10 +0000

Date published:

Thursday, 22 May, 2014

Document type:

White paper

Author(s):

A. Di Meglio

M. Gaillard

A. Purcell

This whitepaper describes the major IT challenges in scientific research at CERN and several other European and international research laboratories and projects. Each challenge is exemplified through a set of concrete use cases drawn from the requirements of large-scale scientific programs. The paper is based on contributions from many researchers and IT experts of the participating laboratories and also input from the existing CERN openlab industrial sponsors. The views expressed in this document are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the view of their organisations and/or affiliates.

Technical document file:

CERNopenlabWhitepaperonFutureICTChallengesinScientificResearchV1.3.pdf

Report on ZENODO:

Document on ZENODO

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

Released by:

CERN openlab

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

Melissa Gaillard — Wed, 21 May 2014 15:23:05 +0000

Thursday, 22 May, 2014

CERN openlab 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 CERNproduce 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.

Further information

CERN openlab website: www.cern.ch/openlab

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

Press release: http://press.web.cern.ch/

Contact

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

Whitepaper link

Do not miss tomorrow's webcast on the impact of computing at CERN on society

Mary Touranakou — Mon, 19 May 2014 08:45:40 +0000

Wednesday, 21 May, 2014

On Thursday 22 May 2014, Bob Jones, Head of CERN openlab, will give a lecture on the 'Impact of Computing at CERN on Society' in the framework of CERN's 60th anniversary celebrations. This public lecture will take place at CERN's Globe for Science and Innovation and will explore some of the new IT challenges, how they have been tackled and what impact they are having beyond physics and ultimately on society as a whole.

The webcast will start at 19:30pm Central European Summer Time at the following url: http://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/embed.php?event=318564

More information about this event