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Cern's Hadron Collider Research Fueled By Openstack
CERN's Large Hadron Collider is being rewired and rebuilt with stronger magnets, to enable it to run at twice the power level it had previously.
Credit: Creative Commons
CERN is rebuilding its Large Hadron Collider and re-architecting its data center infrastructure based on OpenStack Grizzly. At the end of the process, the system will be able to collect twice as much data from a research experiment in the collider as before.
The collider is being rewired and rebuilt with stronger magnets to run at twice the power level at which it ran before, meaning it will generate twice as much data as it did when it was taken offline earlier this year, says CERN infrastructure manager Tim Bell. When complete, CERN's federated cloud will encompass 15,000 servers in two locations.
Both the collider and the OpenStack clouds supporting it are scheduled to renew operations at the start of 2015.
"What makes the partnership work is that CERN is a blue-sky laboratory that uses very real-world techniques to unlock the mysteries of nature," says the CERN website. "And we are perhaps the most demanding customer of them all."
Bell says OpenStack is a natural fit for CERN, which supports open source projects. He notes that OpenStack features "a vibrant community" as well as commercial support that is acceptable to the 20 European nations that support the CERN facility.
From InformationWeek
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