CERN openlab - Networking

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.

Technical workshops prepare ground for CERN openlab VI

Orestis Galanis — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 14:28:58 +0000

Monday, 6 March, 2017

Last week, CERN openlab hosted the first of three technical workshops in preparation for the collaboration’s next three-year phase, which starts in 2018. These workshops bring together researchers and representatives of leading ICT companies to discuss the challenges that the high-energy physics community and other fields of ‘big science’ will face over the coming years.

Last week’s workshop focused specifically on topics related to data-centre technologies and infrastructures. A workshop on computer platforms and software will take place later this month, with another scheduled on machine learning and data analytics in April.

“There was plenty of in-depth discussion at the first workshop, on topics such as networking, clouds, storage, databases, and data-centre architectures,” says Maria Girone, CERN openlab CTO. “By bringing together a range of perspectives on these topics, we’re able to identify the most beneficial areas for collaboration in CERN openlab’s next three-year phase.”

In September, CERN openlab will publish a whitepaper based on the outcomes of these workshops. With the LHC and the experiments set to undergo major upgrade work in 2019 and 2020, CERN openlab’s sixth phase offers a clear opportunity to develop ICT solutions that will make a tangible difference for researchers at CERN when the upgraded LHC and experiments come online in 2021.

Find out more about our areas of work in our current three-year phase here.

ViSION: SDN Traffic Orchestrator for Resource Scale-out

Mary Touranakou — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 12:20:21 +0000

Date published:

Wednesday, 7 May, 2014

Document type:

Poster

Author(s):

D. Savu

S. Stancu

Event published at:

CERN openlab Board of Sponsors 2014 - Poster Session

CERN openlab Board of Sponsors 2014 (registered users only)

Technical document file:

openlab.2014-05-07.BoS_.ViSION-poster.pdf

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

Science and Society: the Impact of Computing at CERN on Society by Bob Jones, head of CERN openlab

Mary Touranakou — Mon, 19 May 2014 08:25:03 +0000

Date:

Thursday, 22 May, 2014 - 19:30 to 21:30

Location:

Globe of Science and Innovation

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.

The lecture will be in English, with simultaneous interpreting into French.

Reservation is essential: +41 22 767 76 76 or cern.reception@cern.ch.

There will be a live webcast at: cern.ch/webcast.

Indico or other event webpage:

For more information

Calendar

40 years of computing - Sverre Jarp Symposium

Melissa Gaillard — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 14:38:05 +0000

Date:

Monday, 31 March, 2014 - 14:00 to 17:30

Location:

CERN IT Auditorium

This symposium will review several important technological (r-)evolutions Sverre has seen during his long career at CERN. Examples are the introduction of reliable tape storage, the introduction of the PC as the Physics Computer for LHC (first presented at CHEP-95), multiple decades of hunting for cost effective computing (from mainframes to RISC servers and then to PCs), the efforts of detailed performance tuning (in 7 dimensions), vectorisation of HEP software (which was dropped in the 80s, but is now back with a vengeance), and, finally, more than a decade of industrial collaboration in CERN openlab.

Indico or other event webpage:

Symposium agenda

Calendar

Improving data analytics for better science

Ioannis Georgopoulos — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 10:40:43 +0000

Wednesday, 26 February, 2014

The CERN Data Centre processes a staggering 1000 terabytes of data every day, which is the equivalent of around 210,000 DVDs. And, at peak times, the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Computing Grid may transfer as much as 10 gigabytes of data from its servers every second. However, CERN is not the only research organization dealing with such ‘big data’. Ever-cheaper sensing and data-storage technologies are driving an explosion in data across many fields of science, as well as for businesses of all sizes.

Yesterday, CERN openlab invited research institutions and leading IT companies to participate in a workshop focused on the latest advances in data analytics. “Data analytics brings the promise of further increasing the efficiency of LHC operations, accelerating physics analysis, and preparing us for even more ambitious initiatives,” says Alberto Di Meglio of CERN openlab. “The next CERN openlab phase will lead us to the start of the next planned shutdown of the LHC (LS2) in 2018. This is an excellent opportunity for us to investigate new technical challenges with commercial partners and other European research laboratories.”

Presentations were given at the event by representatives of the invited IT companies. Africa Perianez of the German Meteorological Service spoke about how big data is driving advancements in weather prediction, while at the same time posing analytical challenges. Meanwhile, Nenad Buncic of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) gave a presentation on the Human Brain Project, an ambitious attempt to improve understanding of the brain by building a completely new type of computing infrastructure. Whereas at CERN the vast majority of scientific data is generated centrally by the LHC experiments, the data for the Human Brain Project is produced by a host of smaller, distributed laboratories. “A lack of data sharing between labs is probably the biggest challenge in neuroscience,” says Buncic. “We are incentivizing labs to share data… but we need to make sure that data conforms to standards and that researchers speak a common vocabulary.”

Salim Ansari from the European Space Research and Technology Centre also gave a presentation on the vast amounts of data being generated by the European Space Agency’s fleet of Earth-observing and space-science satellites. He discussed how the operational efficiency of satellites can be improved by analyzing orbital data and explained how the concept of ‘predictive analytics’ is changing how astrophysical data is handled. “Analytics can play a major role in simplifying scientific research,” says Ansari. “Discovery tools can be automated, thus freeing the scientist from having to carry out much of the search for knowledge.”

Finally, CERN’s Johannes Gutleber gave a brief presentation on long-term studies into a potential successor to the LHC. While any such machine wouldn’t begin operations for at least another 20 years, it is important, says Gutleber, to think now about the computing infrastructures that will be required to analyze the huge data output. “We need to think about how the computing infrastructures are going to evolve. We need to build infrastructures that are going to survive the trends and fashions of computing today, while being flexible enough to incorporate future advancements in technology.”

Article on isgtw.org

Improving data analytics for better science

Ioannis Georgopoulos — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 08:25:50 +0000

Date published:

26 Feb 2014

Outlet:

isgtw.org

The CERN Data Centre processes a staggering 1000 terabytes of data every day, which is the equivalent of around 210,000 DVDs.

Link:

Article on isgtw.org

Copy of the coverage:

Improving data analytics for better science _ iSGTW.pdf

HP report

Ioannis Georgopoulos — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 08:26:04 +0000

Author(s):

S. Stancu

Date presented:

Thursday, 13 February, 2014

Event presented at:

CERN openlab Major Review Meeting

More information about the event

Presentation file:

0[1].pdf

Software Defined Networking: technology details and openlab research overview

Ioannis Georgopoulos — Fri, 14 Feb 2014 09:02:49 +0000

Author(s):

D. Savu

S. Stancu

Date presented:

Friday, 14 February, 2014

Event presented at:

IT Technical Forum

IT Technical Forum on Indico

Presentation file:

0[1].pdf

Video link:

Watch the presentation online

Wireless Control and Optimisation

Ioannis Georgopoulos — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 16:37:55 +0000

Date published:

Thursday, 28 February, 2013

Document type:

CERN openlab report

Author(s):

M. Hulboj

V. Lapadatescu

'CERN membership can make Ireland a global hub for young scientists and leading innovators' Kelly

Ioannis Georgopoulos — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 08:13:53 +0000

Date published:

23 Jan 2014

Outlet:

southernstar.ie

Sean Kelly MEP and member of the European Parliament’s Industry, Research and Energy Committee, has urgently requested a meeting with Dr Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research and the world’s top particle physics lab, to progress steps towards Ireland’s membership of CERN.

Link:

Article on southernstar.ie

Copy of the coverage:

'CERN membership can make Ireland a global hub for young scientists and leading innovators' Kelly _ SouthernStar _ News.pdf

Tracking and joining billions of dots of data

Ioannis Georgopoulos — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:13:53 +0000

Date published:

16 Jan 2014

Outlet:

timeshighereducation.co.uk

Work is under way to ensure that big data do not mean big headaches for researchers in the physical sciences

Link:

Article on timeshighereducation.co.uk

Copy of the coverage:

Tracking and joining billions of dots of data _ News _ Times Higher Education.pdf

HP Video

Ioannis Georgopoulos — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 11:05:10 +0000

Date Published:

Friday, 27 May, 2011

Video from HP, including Jean Michel Jouanigot, Communications Systems group leader, IT Department, CERN.

Video presenting CERN openlab activities

Ioannis Georgopoulos — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 10:57:01 +0000

Date Published:

Wednesday, 9 May, 2012