Three external visits were organized this year for the CERN openlab summer students. On Friday the 19th of July, the summer students visited EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne). The students attended a general presentation about EPFL given by Colin Grisel. They were introduced to the “Blue Brain Project”  by Felix Schuermann, and to the concept and the work of “EcoCloud” by Boris Grot.

 

One week later, the visit to ILL (Institut Laue-Langevin) took place. The openlab summer students traveled to Grenoble, France, in order to learn more about the largest neutron facility in the world. The scientists explained the students how the neutrons are accelerated, how they are handled, and went through the wide range of the research results applications. After visiting the data centre of ILL, the students attended lectures focusing on the ILL IT challenges. Finally they visited the nuclear reactor from a distance of 8 meters!

 

In the beginning of August, the students traveled to Zurich and stayed overnight in the city, in order to visit the university along with a couple of companies' offices. More specifically, the students were invited to OpenSystems headquarters, where company employees presented their work on Information Security. The company gave the students the opportunity to further discuss IT topics with the engineers at the occasion of an informal lunch. In the same day, the students enjoyed a city tour of Zurich; they walked around the city and visited the renowned Technical University of Zurich, known as ETH Zürich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich). Current ETH students guided the openlab summer students to the University's campus and gave some presentations about the projects they conducted during their studies. The next day, the students visited Google's offices in Zurich. They were guided through the Google premises and attended lectures given by Google engineers on various topics. They also had the chance to chat with Google interns to exchange ideas.