© 2018 CERN
HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
The WLCG is the largest collection of computing resources ever assembled for a single scientific endeavour. It consists of more than 800,000 processor cores, with 400 petabytes on disk and 500 petabytes on tape. There are around 170 sites in the WLCG, located across all continents except Antarctica. The networks of the WLCG move
roughly two petabytes of data daily. The WLCG differs from more traditional high- performance computing centres in that it is much more distributed, with applications well adapted for parallelisation and for running independently. Multiple LHC experiments have also
carried out tests to examine the feasibility of expanding into commercial cloud resources for processing data. I recently led demonstrations that showed we could double the processing resources available to a single experiment for bursts.
What is CERN openlab? CERN openlab is a public-private partnership between CERN and leading ICT companies. Our mission is to accelerate the development of cutting- edge ICT solutions for the worldwide LHC community – as well as for wider scientific research. Through CERN openlab, CERN provides
access to its complex ICT infrastructure and its engineering experience. Testing in CERN’s demanding environment provides the ICT industry collaborators with valuable feedback on their products, while enabling CERN to assess the merits of new technologies in their early stages of
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development for possible future use. This framework also offers a neutral ground for carrying out advanced research- and-development activities with multiple companies.
CERN openlab was first initiated 2001. How has its role changed over this time? Since its establishment in 2001, CERN openlab has been organised into successive three-year phases. Working in this manner provides us with regular opportunities to assess our progress and to ensure that we are always working to tackle the ICT challenges most relevant to the LHC research community. Our first phase focused specifically on the development of an advanced computing-cluster prototype, but since then our work has expanded to incorporate a much wider range of domains, including work related to grid computing, networking, virtualisation, industrial control systems, new computing architectures, and much more. Our fifth three-year phase came to
a close at the end of 2017. This phase featured around 20 R&D projects; these tackled ambitious challenges covering the most critical needs of ICT infrastructures
“Through CERN openlab, CERN provides access to its complex ICT infrastructure and its engineering experience”
in domains such as data acquisition, computing platforms, data storage architectures, compute provisioning and management, networks and communication, and data analytics. During our fifth phase, CERN openlab
also grew to include more collaborating companies, thus enabling a wider range of ICT challenges to be addressed. For the first time, other research institutes also joined CERN openlab in our endeavour to accelerate the development of cutting- edge ICT solutions for science. Working together with other laboratories to tackle common ICT challenges is both highly useful and helps to ensure maximum relevancy of our work. As well as this technical work, CERN openlab also carries out training and educational activities. This is an area that has really grown over the past decade and a half. For example, each year we run a nine-week programme for about 40 students. Bachelor’s and master’s students specialising in subjects related to computer science come to CERN to work on cutting-edge projects with our collaborators. These projects often feature hands-on practice with the latest ICT solutions.
As CERN prepares for ‘the High- Luminosity LHC’ in 2026 how will the computing requirements change? CERN openlab’s new three-year phase, which started at the beginning of 2018, aims to address many of the ICT challenges posed by the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). Last September, we
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