Last week, CERN openlab held its annual technical workshop. The event, which took place on 8-9 December, saw representatives of the CERN openlab collaborating companies and organisations gather in the CERN IT Department. The event featured presentations highlighting the progress made by the CERN openlab projects since the launch of public-private partnership’s fifth phase at the start of 2015.

Future challenges were also discussed at the event, with the aim of identifying potential areas of work for the next three-year phase of CERN openlab (phase VI). Presentations were given by researchers highlighting key ICT challenges in the following areas: data acquisition and filtering, networks and connectivity, compute management and provisioning, data storage architectures and databases, and data analytics and machine learning. These challenges, which underpin progress in several fields of scientific research, will help shape CERN openlab’s future work: they will play a central role in defining the areas for collaboration.

“The workshop was a great opportunity to meet with representatives from our collaborators and the LHC experiments,” says Maria Girone, CERN openlab CTO. “Together, we discussed future techniques and technologies that will play a critical role in enabling us to address the computing challenges posed by the ambitious LHC upgrade programme.”

If you missed the workshop and would like to find out more, please visit the event’s Indico page. Here you can find slides of the presentations given at the event, participant details, and more.