World-renowned nuclear physics laboratory explores cloud computing with Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster

TORONTO, Dec. 17 -- Platform Computing, the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software, today announced that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has advanced its current Platform LSF grid infrastructure to pilot the world's largest cloud computing environment for scientific collaboration. Using Platform's private cloud management and HPC cloud-enabling software solutions, Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster, CERN believes the cloud project will allow them to deliver increased computing performance and offer better infrastructure services to its 10,000 researchers from 85 countries. The scientists are working at the new high energy frontier in particle physics to explain fundamental mysteries of the universe such as why particles have mass and the nature of all the "missing mass" in the universe.

Founded in 1954, CERN is one of the world's largest and most respected scientific research facilities. At CERN, complex scientific instruments are used to study fundamental physics, or the basic constituents of matter that reveal how the universe works. In addition to the center's renowned research into particle physics, CERN is also known for its global network of collaborative scientific research partners and technological innovation, including the HTTP networking protocol that led to the creation of the World Wide Web, and the construction of the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and now the advancement of cloud computing.

"For CERN's cloud computing initiative, we needed an infrastructure that would support our existing grid in a heterogeneous environment that could manage both the VMs and physical machines necessary for our researchers to run projects smoothly since their computing needs change constantly as the data is processed," said Tony Cass, Group Leader, Fabric Infrastructure and Operations, CERN. "Platform's ISF and ISF Adaptive Cluster, combined with the Platform LSF grid workload management solution already in place, will provide our users the scalability and flexibility they need to manage their clusters and share datacenter resources while adhering to our requirements for open standards."

At CERN, massive amounts of scientific data are processed and must be distributed to researchers in near real time. As a result, CERN's cloud infrastructure has to provide the capacity necessary to support production and analysis of more than 15 petabytes of data per year, processed by 60,000 CPU cores, allowing scientists to manage workloads themselves as opposed to a centralized IT management department at CERN's laboratory near Geneva. Because CERN uses Platform's LSF grid and workload management solution to enable the extensive scalability to analyze its vast research data, the laboratory chose to partner again with Platform to explore how to more effectively utilize their resources in a virtualized cloud environment.

Platform ISF and ISF Adaptive Cluster provide an open, low-cost common platform for CERN's scientists, allowing the management of both virtual and physical servers in the cloud. In addition, scientists can manage their own application environments and control projects dynamically for maximum flexibility and efficient workload processing in a more cost-effective manner than with a centralized IT management department.

"CERN is where the fields of computing and scientific discovery intersect on a grand scale to advance our understanding of the universe and ourselves," said Songnian Zhou, CEO, Platform Computing. "Since collaboration and sharing are fundamental to scientific research, Platform ISF and ISF Adaptive Cluster enable the ability to easily collaborate and manage data along with the supercomputing power researchers need to capture, simulate, reconstruct and analyze scientific events. Our partnership with CERN started in the early 1990's in support of their large distributed computing production and is expanding along with CERN and enterprises worldwide as they lead the evolution of the Internet from networking protocol to grid to cloud."

About CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status. Visit www.cern.ch.

About Platform Computing

Platform Computing is the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software - serving more than 2,000 of the world's most demanding organizations. For 17 years, our workload and resource management solutions have delivered IT responsiveness and lower costs for enterprise and HPC applications. Platform has strategic relationships with Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS. Visit www.platform.com.

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Source: Platform Computing