Long live CERN…

September marks the second birthday of CERN’s Hadron Collider. That makes it two years since the machine was switched on to start uncovering the mysteries of the universe.

For us at Platform Computing, this anniversary is particularly exciting as it also serves as a reminder of the work we are doing to help CERN reach it goals. After all, answering life’s fundamental questions would be impossible without the technology to support it. No human has the capacity to see a particle, let alone weigh it, without some substantial help from the world of IT.

In fact, our work with CERN stretches back well beyond the Hadron Collider. We first started working with the team in the early 1990s when they implemented Platform LSF. The need for scalability and adaptability are key for its success as new projects are being launched all the time and no organization has the resources to bring in new systems every few months to accommodate these.

Over the past two decades, we’ve continued to work with CERN and address their changing demands. We’ve helped develop and implement software to support more jobs and more nodes as the size of its cluster has increased. So, when significant advances like the Hadron Collider are announced and its success demonstrated, we like to feel like we’ve played a small part.If you are a Scientific Computing World subscriber, see page 42 of the October/November 2010 issue, Helge Meinhard, group leader, platform and engineering services, IT Department, CERN talks about overcoming problems faced by just about any HPC center in the world: space, power, cooling and budget and how Platform ISF and LSF are assisting to meeting their challenges.