Cern Uses Cloud for Next Challenge

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Cern, the vast underground laboratory under the mountains bordering France and Switzerland, has taken on some huge challenges – but few could be larger than storing all the data it has picked up.

The centre has become famous for its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments, based on firing beams and particles down a long tunnel deep underground, in an attempt to break new ground in human knowledge about the universe and the physics behind it.

All this has gained plenty of popular publicity over legal attempts to stop the LHC being switched on in 2008 amid claims it could cause a 'mini big-bang' that could destroy the Earth, along with the recent discovery of the elusive Higgs Boson. However, the work that has created the headlines has involved not only the use of enormous energy, but also the collating and study of vast quantities of data.

Researchers based at Cern – from the professors at the top to PHD students helping quantify and analyse the data – are often engaged in a far less glamorous job, away from the press releases and talk of Nobel prizes. The discoveries made have not occurred because of instant results flashing up on a screen, but through a comprehensive and careful process of sifting through the immense pile of data created.

This has created another issue. While Cern might have discovered the particle that causes matter to have mass, there is no doubt that huge amounts of offsite backup, document storage and cloud computing facilities are essential to enable it to be stored.

Speaking to the Structure Europe conference, Cern's head of infrastructure Tim Bell noted that when the LHC is operational, the particle collisions are captured by 100 megapixel cameras, each of which takes 40 million pictures per second, meaning that every second sees one petabyte of data being created, Cloudpro reports.

He added: “Our challenge is that 35 petabytes of that data needs to be recorded every year and the the Large Hadron Collider will double that. And the scientists want to keep that data for 20 years.”

This almost unimaginably large quantity of data poses a major challenge, but it is one Cernbelieves can be solved by using the public cloud.

At present the LHC is non-functional and is being cooled down so maintenance can be carried out before it starts up again in 2015. By that time, some of the functionality of Cern will have been removed to an offsite location at Wigner, near Budapest. This will boost the 3 MW capacity of Cern by an extra 2.5 MW. Its facilities include 500 servers, 20,000 cores and 5.5 petabytes of data storage that Cern can make use of.

Using this extra capacity alongside its existing computers, Cern will be conducting 90 per cent of its computing via the cloud when the LHC is switched on again.

In doing so, it will be seeking to learn more about the properties of the Higgs Boson, which Edinburgh-based professor Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of in 1964. Back then, of course, there was no way of carrying out the necessary experiments to test the theory, or store the immense amount of data the computers would be required to store for analysis.

Cern was created back in 1954, since when it has grown from having two member nations to 20, with that alone extending the scale of its data storage needs even before its various experiments with particles are taken into account.

It states of its Boson discovery: "This particle is consistent with the Higgs Boson but it will take further work to determine whether or not it is the Higgs Boson predicted by the standard model. The Higgs Boson, as proposed within the standard model, is the simplest manifestation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Other types of Higgs bosons are predicted by other theories that go beyond the standard model."

Experiments aimed at confirming or disproving these notions will take time, energy, money and, of course, the lengthy analysis of vast quantities of data. However, by using the cloud, this cutting edge scientific venture can at least be sure of being able to obtain the storage space it needs.

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‘Cern Uses Cloud for Next Challenge. September 19, 2013. Storetec.