CERN openlab Phase IX brainstorming

2 Dec 2026, 09:00 → 3 Dec 2026, 17:00 Europe/Zurich

31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre (CERN)

Eric Wulff (CERN), Joelma Tolomeo (CERN), Luca Atzori (CERN), Luca Mascetti (CERN), Maria Girone (CERN), Marta Josa Bordell, Miroslav Potocky (CERN), Stan Jewhurst (CERN), Thomas Owen James (CERN)

CERN openlab Phase IX Brainstorming Session

As CERN openlab prepares for its next three-year phase, this two-day brainstorming session brings together stakeholders from across CERN and representatives of openlab’s industrial partners to help shape its future.

The meeting will take place on December 2nd (full day) and 3rd (afternoon), 2026 as a hybrid event (at CERN and on Zoom). All brainstorming topics will be available from the timetable. Participants will discuss the technological challenges facing the Laboratory and its experiments, and explore the research directions and collaborations openlab should pursue in Phase IX.

The outcome of these discussions will directly inform the definition of openlab’s priorities for the coming phase. CERN participants are kindly asked to complete the preparatory survey before the event, as its results will form the basis of the sessions.

This will ensure that openlab’s activities in Phase IX remain closely aligned with CERN’s scientific and strategic priorities.

Wednesday 2 December

09:00 → 09:30 Coffee, pastries and chat

09:30 → 10:30 Network - interconnects, fabrics and real-time data movement

Some of the topics we hope to cover in this session are:

• Emerging interconnect standards and transports (UltraEthernet,
  RoCEv2)
• Optical interconnects and photonics
• Real-time and online data movement
• Connectivity in constrained and harsh environments
• Network-aware and orchestrated data movement
• Deterministic networking, timing and synchronisation

Speaker: Stan Jewhurst (CERN)

10:30 → 12:00 Low latency inference and real-time data processing

In this session we hope to cover:

• FPGA hardware and tools
• Scalable FPGA ML/AI solutions
• Accelerators for real-time data processing
• Applications of real-time inference for physics
• Real-time data movement

Speaker: Thomas Owen James (CERN)

12:00 → 13:00 Lunch break

13:00 → 15:00 HPC and AI Computing architectures

Topics that we might cover in this session:

• CPUs: x86, ARM
• GPUs
• FPGA accelerators
• DPUs
• RISC-V and other emerging processors
• Co-design of hardware, systems software and scientific applications
• New programming models, performance portability and workload-aware
  optimisation
• Early evaluation and benchmarking of new products
• Federated, hybrid, and HPC computing resources
• Beyond-GPU AI accelerators (tenstorrent, CEREBRAS, Furiosa etc)
• Distributed training and hyper parameter optimization on HPC

Speaker: Luca Atzori (CERN)

15:00 → 15:30 Coffee and brainstorming

15:30 → 17:00 AI applications

Topics that we might cover in this session:

• Large Language Models
• Foundation models
• Digital Twins
• AI agents and agentic workflows
• Machine Learned Particle Flow
• AI for publications
• AI/ML for physics simulation, reconstruction, and analysis
• AI-driven operations and autonomous data-centre management
• Experiment operations, fault detection, and real-time feedback

Speaker: Eric Wulff (CERN)

Thursday 3 December

14:00 → 17:00 Data infrastructure, storage, and databases

In this session we plan to cover:

• Next-generation storage and data-management architectures
• Long-term preservation, archival technologies and sustainable storage
• Converged Databases (JSON duality, Lakehouse / Iceberg,Data catalogs)
• Database Scalability with TrueCache (as lightweight replacement of
  Active DataGuard)
• Database Security for agentic AI access (Deep Data Security)

Speakers: Luca Mascetti (CERN), Miroslav Potocky (CERN)