In SPECTRUM, CERN contributes as High Energy Domain Expert Community.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and home of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful accelerator providing research facilities for HEP researchers across the globe. In the first run of the accelerator, resulting in the Nobel prize-winning discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC experiments generated up to 27 PB of data per year. This rate has increased since the LHC’s second run starting in 2015. In processing and analysing this data the experiments run more than 2 Million jobs per day on the global distributed computing infrastructure federating more than 200 computer centres worldwide.
This is the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) project, which is led by CERN, and provides the resources to store, distribute, analyse, and access close to real time LHC data for a global community of more than 10,000 physicists. The CERN IT department currently has 230 staff, predominantly engineers, who operate one of Europe’s largest research computer centres, supporting about 17,000 users. The department has developed leading expertise in large scale data centres and longstanding collaborations with industrial and academic partners in the fields of HPC, advanced networking, large scale collaborative tools and is a driver of open access to scientific publications and data.
It is a major player in the design, development and deployment of grid, Cloud and volunteer computing infrastructures with contribution in all the functional areas of computing, data storage and management, security, identity management and more.
