CERN openlab publishes a whitepaper on future IT challenges

As much as 96 percent  of our universe is still unknown and the challenges ahead for the scientific community are striking. 

 

More than ever, computing plays a critical role in helping uncover our universe’s mysteries. Scientific research has seen a dramatic rise in the amount and rate of production of data collected by instruments, detectors and sensors in the recent years. 

 

The LHC detectors at CERN produce a staggering one petabyte of data per second, a figure that will increase during the next LHC run starting in 2015. New international research infrastructures are being deployed and are expected to produce comparable—or even greater—amounts of data in various scientific domains, such as neurology, radio astronomy or genetics, and with instruments as diverse as Earth observation satellites, high-performance genomic sequencers, neutron diffractometers or X-ray antennas. More than ever, collaboration will play a vital role in enabling discoveries, CERN  said in a statement.

 

In this context, CERN openlab together with a number of European laboratories, such as EMBL-EBI, ESA, ESRF, ILL, and researchers from the Human Brain Project, as well as input from leading IT companies, have published a whitepaper defining the ambitious challenges covering the most crucial needs of IT infrastructures in domains such as data acquisition, computing platforms, data storage architectures, compute provisioning and management, networks and communication, and data analytics. 

 

A number of use cases in different scientific and technological fields are described for each of the six major areas of investigation.

 

 In the current CERN openlab phase, Huawei, Intel, Oracle, Siemens are openlab partners, while Rackspace is a contributor and Yandex an associate.