9–10 Jun 2015
CERN
Europe/Zurich timezone
There is a live webcast for this event.

Programme description

CERN openlab is proposing a first-of-its-kind ‘Open Day’ event on 10 June, 2015. This will be the first in a series of annual events at which research and industrial teams from CERN openlab present their projects, share their achievements, and collect feedback from their user communities.

CERN openlab is a unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading ICT companies. Its mission is to accelerate the development of cutting-edge solutions to be used by the worldwide LHC community.

Within this framework, CERN provides access to its complex ICT infrastructure and its engineering experience, in some cases even extended to collaborating institutes worldwide. Testing in CERN’s demanding environment provides the ICT industry partners with valuable feedback on their products, while allowing CERN to assess the merits of new technologies in their early stages of development for possible future use. This framework also offers a neutral ground for carrying out advanced R&D with more than one company.

CERN openlab was created in 2001 and is now in its fifth phase (2015-2017). This phase addresses new topics crucial to the CERN scientific programme. The topics have primarily been defined in the past 18 months through discussion and collaborative analysis of requirements between CERN openlab industrial members and representatives of the CERN and LHC experiments. In an effort to identify common challenges and work on common solutions, this analysis has also seen the participation of representatives from other international research centres. The outcomes of this preliminary analysis are now driving the fifth phase of CERN openlab and have been openly published in the form of a whitepaper on ‘Future IT Challenges in Scientific Research’.

The topics addressed during the current phase of CERN openlab fall in such categories as next-generation data-acquisition systems, optimised hardware- and software-based computing platforms for simulation and analysis, scalable and interoperable data storage and management, cloud-computing operations and procurement, and data-analytics platforms and applications. For many of the use cases identified by technical experts in high-energy physics or other communities, joint investigation projects have been set up in partnership with leading industrial companies. These companies are interested in working with research communities to solve common problems and are able to provide leading-edge technologies and ideas.

The process of defining requirements, identifying suitable industrial partners, and setting up joint projects is a continuous activity of CERN openlab in its effort to support the scientific mission of CERN, share knowledge and expertise, and train the next generations of engineers and scientists.