Competence Centres
To accommodate the breadth of technical work undertaken in collaboration with the Industry Members, the technical activities of CERN openlab are organised into four different domains of competence. In addition to focusing on projects within these areas, openlab and Industry Member staff participate in cross-centre collaborations, which also offer valuable avenues for collaboration.
Through the Automation and Controls Competence Centre (ACCC), CERN and Siemens are collaborating on security, as well as the opening of automation tools towards software engineering and handling of large environments. Cooperation in the fourth phase will address the aggregation of this data into business intelligence and business analytics.
In partnership with Oracle, the Database Competence Centre (DCC) focuses on items such as data distribution and replication, monitoring and infrastructure management, highly available database services and application design, as well as automatic failover and standby databases.
One focus of Networking Competence Centre (NCC) was CINBAD, a research project launched by CERN and HP to understand the behaviour of large computer networks (10’000+ nodes) in High Performance Computing or large Campus installations. Since February 2010, a new openlab team under the codename WIND (Wireless Infrastructure Network Deployment) carries out research and provides new algorithms, guidelines and solutions to support the deployment and operation of the Wi-Fi infrastructure at CERN. A new project called VISION (Virtual Services In Openflow Networks) also started at the inception of openlab-IV, with the objective of optimizing network resource utilization using an SDN (Software Defined Networking) approach based on the emerging OpenFlow technology.
The Platform Competence Centre (PCC) focuses on the PC-based computing hardware and the related software. In collaboration with Intel, it addresses important fields such as thermal optimisation, application tuning and benchmarking. It also has a strong emphasis on teaching. Huawei joined openlab-IV and the Platform Competence Centre as a contributor for a year to work on innovative cloud storage system solutions allowing scaling and high performance.
CERN openlab also hosts yearly projects which do not require the enrolment of computer scientists by CERN and hence are not part of any of the four competence centres, but are listed in this section.