Discoveries in fundamental physics require constant technological innovation in such diverse fields as computing, electronics, materials science, and industrial sensing and control systems. CERN provides a stimulating environment where talented minds from multiple disciplines can meet to make such innovation happen. 

The success of existing and future scientific and experimental programmes depends among other factors on an efficient exploitation of the recent and future advances in computing technology. Computing power is needed for a number of very important tasks. The data produced by scientific detectors and instruments—and possibly filtered by the data acquisition systems—needs to be processed and analysed to understand whether it represent a significant event or physical phenomenon, or to produce aggregated, consolidated, or derived information. The data must also be reprocessed when new algorithms are defined or the instruments are recalibrated, and simulations of the instruments’ behaviours and properties have to be performed to provide comparative numbers against which the real data can be measured.

European scientific research has benefited in the past several years from the increasing availability of computing and data infrastructures that have provided unprecedented capabilities for large-scale distributed scientific initiatives. A number of major projects and endeavours, such as EGI14, PRACE15, WLCG16, OSG17 (in the USA), and others, have been established to share the ever-growing amount of computational and storage resources. This collaborative effort has involved hundreds of participating research organisations, academic institutes, and commercial companies. The major outcome was a number of active production infrastructures providing services to many research communities, such as HEP, life sciences, material science, astronomy, computational chemistry, environmental science, humanities, and more.