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Cern lab hones business tech of the future

By Nick Heath, ZDNet UK on October 21, 2008

Summary

The IT department at the lab behind the Large Hardon Collider is testing new tech from companies such as Intel and Oracle that will trickle down into enterprises.

Topics

cern, chip, cpu, data center, hp procurve, intel corp., oracle corp., particle physic

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Cutting-edge particle physics is being used to hone new technology that will eventually make its way into enterprises.

The Cern nuclear-physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, is helping the technology industry refine the multicore processors and fat gigabit networks destined for the data centers of tomorrow through the Openlab initiative.

Through the project, the IT department at the lab behind the Large Hadron Collider pushes cutting-edge kit to breaking point to perfect it for its own use, and the consumer and business markets.

The lab has partnerships with companies including HP ProCurve, Intel and Oracle, who provide the backbone of its IT infrastructure, its 8,000-server computer center and its links to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, consisting of more than 100,000 processors spread over 33 countries.

Cern's chief information officer, Wolfgang von Rueden, told ZDNet Asia sister site silicon.com: "We wait for industry to develop the technology, then we take it and see how far we can push it and feed back to them."

Von Rueden said Openlab is currently helping Intel to test out its new chip designs.

"We are looking at optimizing and measuring the performance of new CPUs, doing tests on new architectures. The very first quad-core that left the [United States] for Europe came to Cern and we tested that," he said.

Cern has also helped Intel optimize more than 100 software compilers for its chips, over 50 of which have gone on to be implemented.

The lab is working with HP ProCurve on automated data collection, to allow the lab to monitor behavior over its vast network, with 70,000 1Gb ports exchanging data within the Cern complex alone.

Von Rueden said: "We try to gather all of the data together and analyze them and try to understand, in automated ways, what would you call a standard data pattern?"

"Then you can find an abnormal data pattern to detect abnormal behavior on the network. This obviously would have a use in any large data center," said Von Rueden.

Cern was at the forefront of testing 10Gbps networks before they became widely available, and has dedicated 10Gbps links to its 11 main tier-one computing centers worldwide.

Von Rueden said the department has already detected abnormal behavior on the LHC Computing Grid, with some users loading up unauthorized shareware.

Working with Oracle, the department has also managed to greatly increase the speed at which Cern databases could be distributed to its computer centers.

Von Rueden described the challenge of collecting and organizing the millions of streams of information from the LHC's five detectors.

"This data has to be collected, watched and stored and this pushes the database technology quite far," he said.

This continuous refinement of hardware and software has allowed the center to reduce the space needed for its server racks, allowing Cern to double up its storage, CPUs and network bandwidth to maximize reliability.

Nick Heath of Silicon.com reported from London.

Related stories

Cern: Electrical fault caused LHC helium leak

At CERN, computers to tackle the Big Bang

CERN's big collider now in action

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