Content about CERN

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.