Discover big data at CERN

On 28-29 September, members of the public will have the chance to visit CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. There are even opportunities for visitors to venture underground to see the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the enormous particle detectors used by CERN's various physics experiments.

However, there's also plenty of exciting things to see above ground, including the CERN Data Centre, which is at the heart of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, used by researchers across the globe to analyze the tens of petabytes of data generated by the organization's experiments each year.

This video, created for the TEDxCERN event earlier this year, shows the solutions that CERN has developed to handle big data — both today and over previous decades.

"As the rallying call of an era, 'big data' encompasses a multitude of diverse domains, but all share the potential to make a huge impact on society," says Tim Smith, who wrote and narrated the lesson. "Whether the focus is on collecting, preserving, sharing, or combining, these domains all ultimately aim to unlock big data's power through data mining and analysis. Through this, they are striving to put useful information at the fingertips of citizens, services, and businesses the world over."

- Andrew Purcell