Platform Computing today announced that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has advanced its current Platform LSF grid infrastructure to pilot the world’s largest cloud computing environment for scientific collaboration.
Using Platform’s private cloud management and HPC cloud-enabling software solutions, Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster, CERN believes the cloud project will allow them to deliver increased computing performance and offer better infrastructure services to its 10,000 researchers from 85 countries. The scientists are working at the new high energy frontier in particle physics to explain fundamental mysteries of the universe such as why particles have mass and the nature of all the “missing mass” in the universe.
Founded in 1954, CERN is one of the world’s largest and most respected scientific research facilities. At CERN, complex scientific instruments are used to study fundamental physics, or the basic constituents of matter that reveal how the universe works. In addition to the center’s renowned research into particle physics, CERN is also known for its global network of collaborative scientific research partners and technological innovation, including the HTTP networking protocol that led to the creation of the World Wide Web, and the construction of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and now the advancement of cloud computing.
At CERN, massive amounts of scientific data are processed and must be distributed to researchers in near real time. As a result, CERN’s cloud infrastructure has to provide the capacity necessary to support production and analysis of more than 15 petabytes of data per year, processed by 60,000 CPU cores, allowing scientists to manage workloads themselves as opposed to a centralized IT management department at CERN’s laboratory near Geneva. Because CERN uses Platform’s LSF grid and workload management solution to enable the extensive scalability to analyze its vast research data, the laboratory chose to partner again with Platform to explore how to more effectively utilize their resources in a virtualized cloud environment.
Platform ISF and ISF Adaptive Cluster provide an open, low-cost common platform for CERN’s scientists, allowing the management of both virtual and physical servers in the cloud. In addition, scientists can manage their own application environments and control projects dynamically for maximum flexibility and efficient workload processing in a more cost-effective manner than with a centralized IT management department.
Leave a Reply