Europe’s leading research centers and commercial service providers are working towards creating a new cloud platform called: Helix Nebula-the Science Cloud. The project is being funded and advanced to provide greater data storage and processing power for Europe’s major scientific research projects, and CERN, the European Lab for particle physics, which is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will be the first to implement Helix Nebula-the Science Cloud.
The project to create the new science cloud will be headed by CERN, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the European Space Agency (ESA), and commercial service providers to support CERN’s enormous IT requirements from the immense data generated by the Large Hadron Collider and the hundreds of European scientists working at CERN. The new science cloud will have an initial two-year pilot phase during which other science organizations such as the EMBL and ESA will also use the new science cloud.
LHC in underground tunnel. Photo property of CERN.
After the initial two-year pilot, Helix Nebula-the Science Cloud will be available to Government agencies and Businesses. The science cloud will enable CERN to capture and store more data from the Large Hadron Collider, which generates approximately 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually. After a particle collision within the LHC, collected data is distributed across the world to 34 different countries on CERN’s data storage infrastructure: the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). There are eleven data center providers offering access to CERN on the Grid including companies in the U.S, Canada, Italy, France and the UK.
“CERN’s computing capacity needs to keep-up with the enormous amount of data coming from the Large Hadron Collider and we see Helix Nebula- the Science Cloud as a great way of working with industry to meet this challenge,” said Frédéric Hemmer, head of CERN’s IT department.
Before a collision, subatomic particles are fired around the 17 mile track of the LHC, traveling at 99.9999991% the speed of light. Each experiment will yield approximately 600 million collisions every second. To capture the immense data generated by the HLC, CERN possesses the most powerful supercomputer system in the world.
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