Q&A: CTO of CERN's openlab

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The biggest science experiment in the world is about to kick off (again) - and it's bringing a lot of IT with it.

Last year, the particle smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN lab near Geneva started up, and promptly broke down. But another beam is set to be sent around the 27km track within weeks, with a tsunami of data set to follow.

There are several parts to the IT that backs up the massive experiment, and everything else CERN does - click here for the full story on CERN's IT. There's the IT behind CERN itself, as well as the LHC experiment. That's so huge that the world of academia has created a massive computing grid to process it all.

And then there's CERN's openlab. This is where the tech of the future is tested. The physicists working on the four main LHC experiments need cutting edge technology, but they need reliability, so it falls on openlab to test everything out first.

We spoke to openlab's chief technology officer, Sverre Jarp, while at CERN with Intel this week, about his job, the future of multicore, graphics processors and more.

What does the CERN openlab do? What’s your day to day work?

Openlab is trying to look at new IT technologies. This means following the Xeon line and making sure that we understand new implementations like Westmere and Sandy Bridge and all the Intel codenames that were mentioned today.

But then we also look at things that are more exotic, more risky. So I think our mission is to take risk. If you’ve heard about Larabee and graphics processors, we also try to look at those.

Most physicists will say, "well, they don’t look ready to go". So it’s sort of our job to maybe understand porting issues, performance issues obviously, but also reliability issues.

Is it important to have ECC [error correction code] memory for instance, is one question that comes up when you go in the direction of graphics processors, because if you do graphics you don’t care about having a red pixel in a blue sky. But if you do physics you don’t want necessarily to have indications of Noble Prizes that turn out to be fakes.

So you're effectively working a step ahead of the rest of CERN's IT?

The LHC computing grid has to run on reliable, trusted evaluated mainstream technology. So we look at the fun stuff.

That must be a fun but daunting job.

It’s very exciting… it’s also frustrating. I’m at a certain age, and of course, every year, every five years, every 10 years, you have to put yourself in question, say "everything I learned during this decade, is it either already obsolete or is it still valid?"

So fortunately, most of what we acquire is valid. But we still have to put ourselves in question. Take graphics processors. How do we go about harnessing the sheer compute power that they promise but still keep them related to the physics computing that we have here at CERN?

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