Q&A: CTO of CERN's openlab

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I think that omnipresence of vectors will force everybody to rethink whether it’s for high energy physics or car crashing or whatever it is.

With the LHC set to be switched on in days, or at least very soon, what changes when that happens or do you just keep motoring along?

In openlab, we keep motoring along. In the CERN IT department, of course there will be an increased emphasis on reliability, stability and all the things that allow the physicists to get as much useful computing out of the center - and not just the centre, but this is in the context of the whole computing grid. So everybody is very much focused on stability and reliability.

How closely do you work with the scientists?

For instance, in the field of programming, we try to have a very close collaboration because depending on the way they express the physics problem, either in a object oriented way or in a vector way, then that will hit Intel’s or AMD’s microarchitecture or Larabee’s architecture in a given way.

And we’re trying to find out how can you keep the physicists happy the way they programme and make sure the machines are kept happy in the way that compiled results hits the microarchitecture.

So every experiment is an IT experiment for you?

Yes, it also becomes a mapping onto the IT. Today we have issues like the amount of memory being used by a physics job, the amount of time being spent, the parallelism expressed – either explicitly or implicitly – and many of these questions we work closely with physicists to understand what are the free parameters – what can we move, what can we change.

What advice would you pass on to IT managers working in the business world?

Well personally I would say that the advice is never rest on your laurels, there’s always something new.

You have to come in every morning and think "what I thought yesterday will probably be put in question today". That is a good motto.

Click here for photos from the LHC experiment.

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