Our Impact

Researchers worldwide access CERN data via our data sharing system

As of November 2015, Comtrade has joined CERN’s openlab as an associate member. Our role at this European Organization for Nuclear Research outlet is to enhance collaboration among the growing number of research organizations which take part in the experiments done in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Just as the amount of data to process increases, so does the number of research organizations participating in these experiments. “We have a tremendous amount of data that needs to be managed, and this is rapidly growing,” Alberto Di Meglio, head of CERN openlab, said at the time. “We provide reliable access and support to the researchers collaborating in the experiments. Comtrade’s expertise will be a huge asset in helping us to continue supporting our community in this manner, even as experimental collaborations grow and more data is produced.”

Our task is to help improve access to and management of that data. This means streamlining the flow of petabytes of data – CERN’s EOS Storage System installation runs across two centers and has 140 petabytes of installed disk space.

Through openlab, CERN collaborates with leading ICT companies and research institutes. Their partners are Huawei, Intel, Oracle and Siemens, while Brocade, Cisco, IDT, Rackspace and Seagate contribute in different ways; Yandex and Comtrade are associate members.

In mid-2018, CERN and Comtrade signed another 3-year agreement, designating Comtrade as the provider of technical support and documentation for EOS, the open-source core of CERN’s data synchronization and sharing system, which serves the scientific community worldwide.