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Content about CERN

July 22, 2015

Discover a musical performance from the Montreux Jazz Festival that was created by converting data collected from CERN's Large Hadron Collider into musical notes.

July 1, 2015

Last week, CERN hosted an event to discuss ongoing efforts to develop a ‘European open science cloud’. The aim of this work is to bring public research organizations and e‐infrastructures together with commercial cloud-computing suppliers to build a common platform offering a range of services to Europe’s research communities.

May 27, 2015

Last week, iSGTW attended the EGI Conference 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Open science was a major theme at the event, with both the European Science Cloud and EGI's vision for the Open Science Commons featuring as major topics of discussion.

April 29, 2015

As iSGTW celebrates its 10th anniversary, Katie Yurkewicz, the publication’s first editor, looks back at the challenges of establishing an e-newsletter to support the fledgling grid-computing community and highlights how the publication has evolved.

April 1, 2015
Click on each pin to find out the name of the site it represents.

Welcome to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), the most sophisticated data-taking and analysis system ever built for science.

April 1, 2015

iSGTW interviews Jorge Gomes, member of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) executive board, ahead of next month’s EGI Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. He explains why it is vital to support research with grid computing, as well as with a range of related IT services. “In order for researchers to be able to collaborate and share data with one another efficiently, the underlying IT infrastructures need to be in place,” says Gomes. “With the amount of data produced by research collaborations growing rapidly, this support is of paramount importance.”

February 4, 2015

CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading ICT companies. Founded in 2001 to develop the innovative ICT systems needed to cope with the unprecedented computing challenges of the Large Hadron Collider, CERN openlab unites science and industry at the cutting edge of research and innovation.

CERN openlab recently entered its fifth phase, which will run until the end of 2017. Now, for the first time in its history, it has extended beyond the CERN community to include other major European and international research laboratories. 

December 3, 2014

LHC@home recently celebrated a decade since its launch in 2004. Through its SixTrack project, the LHC@home platform harnesses the power of volunteer computing to model the progress of sub-atomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light around CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The number of projects supported by LHC@home is growing and the platform now has over 100,000 users from across the globe.

October 29, 2014

Physicists can tell the future — or at least foresee multiple possible versions of it. They do this through computer simulations. Simulations can help scientists predict what will happen when a particular kind of particle hits a particular kind of material in a particle detector. But physicists are not the only scientists interested in predicting how particles and other matter will interact. This information is critical in multiple fields, especially those concerned about the effects of radiation. Physicists and other scientists use the GEANT4 toolkit to identify problems before they occur.

October 29, 2014

Rainforest Connection uses simple devices created from discarded cellphones to listen out for illegal logging activities and provide rangers with real-time alerts. The organization was founded in 2012 by Topher White, who gave a talk about his work at TEDxCERN last month. White’s system has already helped stop illegal logging in Indonesia and further pilot projects are set to be launched soon in both Brazil and Cameroon.

October 22, 2014

iSGTW recently attended the ISC Cloud '14 conference in Heidelberg, Germany. The event focused on the intersection between cloud and high-performance computing (HPC), with in-depth first-hand reports on the latest technological developments in these fields. Researchers from a wide range of organizations discussed their work and offered practical recommendations about how to best utilize cloud-based computing.

September 24, 2014

Monday 29 September marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, otherwise known as CERN, located near Geneva, Switzerland. A new book, entitled 'From Physics to Daily Life', highlights some of the many ways in which technology developed at CERN has impacted upon society at large.

Bob Jones, the head CERN openlab, writes in this book about the growth of distributed computing and the vital role this technology plays across a wide range of academic fields and business sectors.

July 9, 2014

Last week, in a ceremony held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France, CERN and UNESCO commemorated the signature of the CERN Convention and the subsequent 60 years of science for peace.

June 11, 2014

Kuan Hon, research consultant to the Cloud Legal Project, recently came to CERN to discuss the work she and her project colleagues have been doing. She tells iSGTW why it’s important for researchers, businesses, and citizens alike to better understand the legal implications of entering into cloud computing contracts.

"Law always lags behind technology — just look at copyright issues for instance. And, because the pace of technological change is now so fast, it’s getting even harder for the law to catch up. Nevertheless, it’s important for businesses to know what the laws are and do the best they can to comply with them," says Hon.

May 21, 2014

This year’s International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’14) in Leipzig, Germany, is now just one month away. iSGTW speaks to Niko Neufeld ahead of his talk at the event, ‘The Boson in the Haystack’, which will take place during the session on ‘Emerging Trends for Big Data in HPC’ on Wednesday 25 June.

May 21, 2014

Last week, ‘Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud Initiative’ hosted an event at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, to mark the launch of its new cloud-computing marketplace service.

April 2, 2014

Last month, CERN played host to the CineGlobe International Film Festival. The event featured a hackathon event organized by the Tribeca Film Institute, as well as music produced through data sonification.

March 12, 2014

25 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee made his proposal for what would become the world wide web. Berners-Lee, who was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) at the time, submitted the document to his supervisor, Mike Sendall, in March 1989. "Vague but exciting" was Sendall's reaction to the proposal...

March 5, 2014

Research output amounts to much more than just academic papers. It is important that datasets, and the software used to analyze them, are also properly cited and that the researchers behind these are given credit for their work. Preserving software and making it citable is also vital in ensuring that scientific results are reproducible by other research groups.

February 26, 2014

Last week, representatives of major research institutions and leading IT companies came to CERN for a data analytics workshop organized by CERN openlab.

February 12, 2014

Karlheinz Meier, one of the three co-directors of Europe’s Human Brain Project, will deliver a keynote talk at this summer's ISC'14 event in Leipzig, Germany.

Funded by the European Commission, the Human Brain Project is an ambitious endeavor, with the intention of greatly advancing the understanding of the human brain using cutting-edge computer technologies.

January 22, 2014

A LEGO® figurine in the CERN data centre, as seen on Google Street View.

January 8, 2014

Last month, local OpenStack users from France and Switzerland held a meeting at CERN. iSGTW discusses the event with Tim Bell, a member of the OpenStack management board and leader of the Operating Systems and Infrastructure Services group within CERN’s IT department. Bell explains the vital role OpenStack plays in enabling CERN to flexibly tailor its computing resources to meet demand, as well as its importance for other organizations across the globe.

November 27, 2013

The CMS collaboration — one of the two experiments responsible for discovering the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — is set to make a significant portion of its data open to the public. The collaboration is also working with Finland’s IT Center for Science to give high-school students access to this data and to enable them to carry out some simple particle-physics analysis.

October 30, 2013

Scientific output is not just about academic papers: datasets, software, and various forms of multimedia may be produced in the course of research. It is vital that these diverse outputs be citable using persistent identifiers, so that the sharing and the reuse of such materials can be tracked. 

Two weeks ago, the ODIN first year conference was held at CERN to discuss the challenges related to increasing the interoperability of persistent author and object identifiers. These efforts are of particular relevance to large research organizations like CERN, where some high-level datasets have recently been made available to other scientists for re-use.  Equally, the large numbers of collaborators working on the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider can make correct attribution of articles and datasets challenging, too.