Platform Computing has announced that CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, is using its Platform LSF grid infrastructure to power what is said to be the world’s largest cloud computing environment for scientific collaboration.
CERN is using Platform’s private cloud management and HPC cloud-enabling software services, Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster, to enable more powerful computing performance and a better IT infrastructure to 10,000 researchers from 85 countries.
“For CERN’s cloud computing initiative, we needed an infrastructure that would support our existing grid in a heterogeneous environment that could manage both the VMs and physical machines necessary for our researchers to run projects smoothly since their computing needs change constantly as the data is processed,” said Tony Cass, group leader, fabric infrastructure and operations, CERN.
“Platform’s ISF and ISF Adaptive Cluster, combined with the Platform LSF grid workload management solution already in place, will provide our users the scalability and flexibility they need to manage their clusters and share data centre resources while adhering to our requirements for open standards,” Cass said.
Use of the platforms enables CERN to manage physical and virtual servers in the cloud, and a reduction in centralised IT management means users can run their projects and application environments more dynamically.
CERN, based just outside Geneva in Switzerland, is a scientific research lab. It was there that HTTP networking protocol was invented, which led to the creation of the World Wide Web. It’s currently home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, which aims to discover more about the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.
The nature of the research carried out at CERN means that huge amounts of scientific data have to be collated and analysed in real time. The lab processes and analyses over 15 petabytes of data per year, processed by 60,000 CPU cores.
