The OpenStack Cloud at CERN

Editor's Notes

• #5: This is a map of the complex of main accelerators of CERN. The dotted line is the French-Swiss border. The two main CERN sites are Meyrin and Prévessin (as big, but not as built nor populated). The PS is the tiny 600m ring on the Meyrin site, the SPS goes accross the border and the LHC takes all the space between Geneva airport and the Jura (dark green on the left). The 4 red dots represent where the 4 detectors are located.
• #6: The LHC is built underground, for Financial reasons (would have cost too much to buy all the land), Re-using the LEP tunnel, Provisioning of natural shielding of radiations (for the population but also shielding from cosmic rays to the 4 detectors), Mechanical stability You can see on the picture that the 2 counter-rotating beams are hosted in different pipes, making collisions impossible there. The LHC is mainly hosted in a 3m diameter tunnel containing mostly superconducting magnets and some accelerating devices. 8.3T is around 200’000 times stronger than the earth’s magnetic field. 12 kA compares to 10-20 A in your wires at home.
• #7: 120t == 700’000 litres. 1.9K == -271°C. Cables made of Niobium Titanium (NbTi) are «superconducting», it means they don’t heat up anymore as they have no electric resistance.
• #8: Beam pipes need to be as empty as possible to avoid collisions with air molecules.
• #9: ATLAS is a multi-purpose experiment looking for the Higgs Boson (which it has found in 2012), dark matter candidates etc. It gathers 3000 physicists from 174 universities and institutes in 38 countries. Like ATLAS, CMS is also a multi-purpose experiment. It also discovered the Higgs Boson in 2012. The C in CMS stands for Compact. Even though it does not look compact to most of you, this experiment is twice as small as ATLAS but twice as heavy: 2 times the Eiffel Tower (14’000 tonnes)! It gathers 2600 physicists from 182 universities and institutes in 42 countries. The ALICE experiment looks more particularly at the creation of the «Quark Gluon Plasma» state of matter which existed moments after the Big Bang. For that it wait for the beams of lead nuclei which occur about 10% of the beamtime of the LHC. It gathers 1500 physicists from 154 universities and institutes in 37 countries. And the final experiment on the LHC is LHCb. Is is name after the «b» quark which it studies. In fact LHCb studies the behaviour difference between the b quark and the anti-b quark. It tries to find difference in the symmetry which may account for the lack of antimatter in the Universe. It gathers 800 physicists from 69 universities and institutes in 17 countries.
• #10: Run2 is now Run4 is in 10 years from now
• #32: The trigger farms are those servers nearest the accelerator which are not needed while the accelerator is shut down till 2015 Public clouds are interesting for burst load (such as coming up to a conference) or when price drops such as spot market Private clouds allow universities and other research labs to collaborate in processing the LHC data EduGain is a global interfederation service, connecting identity federations technically and legally.