Prestigious US awards for CERN computing

Members of the team that initiated the SHIFT project with the Computerworld trophy. The team was a collaboration between the Information Technology Division, the OPAL experiment and Indiana University. From left to right, Ben Segal, Matthias Schroeder, Gail Hanson, Bernd Panzer, Jean-Philippe Baud, Les Robertson and Frédéric Hemmer.

CERN's award followed the Laboratory's nomination by Lawrence Ellison, Chairman and CEO of the Oracle Corporation. Ellison nominated CERN in recognition of 'pioneering work in developing a large scale data warehouse' - an innovative computing architecture that responds precisely to the global particle physics community's needs.
The Compu-terworld Honors Program brings together the Chairpersons or Chief Executive Officers of the one hundred foremost information technology companies in the world to help the world's leading universities, libraries, and research institutions document the global information technology revolution. The winners in each of ten categories, selected from more than 500 nominations submitted, were announced at a gala event in Washington. Also among the winners was Tim Berners-Lee, who received the Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Leadership Award for Global Integration in recognition of his pioneering work on the World Wide Web - work carried out while he was at CERN in the early 1990s.
CERN's award recognises the smooth way that the Laboratory moved from the era of huge 'mainframe' computers to the modern era of commodity computing, where the Laboratory has played a pioneering role for over a decade. In the early 1990s, a collaboration of computer scientists from the Laboratory, led by Les Robertson, and physicists from the OPAL experiment developed a computing architecture called 'SHIFT', which allowed multiple tape, disk, and CPU servers to interact over high performance network protocols. The change from mainframes to SHIFT is a bit like the change from the hi-fi units of the 50s to the modular systems of today. Back then, if you wanted a new pair of speakers, you had to change the whole unit. Today, if a better pair of speakers comes along, you can just change that part of the system. So it is with the new computing architecture. SHIFT's modular design simultaneously allows scalability and easy adoption of new technologies. Over the years, CERN has proven these features by evolving SHIFT from the systems of the 1990s, based on so-called RISC workstations and specialised networks, to today's massive systems with thousands of Linux PC nodes linked by Gigabit Ethernet to hundreds of Terabytes of automated tape storage coupled to dozens of Terabytes of caches based on commodity disk components.
CERN has worked on evolving SHIFT in collaboration with physicists and engineers from universities and laboratories around the world. Several collaborations with industrial partners have been formed as successive technologies were integrated into the system. Today, SHIFT is in daily use by the many physics experiments that use CERN's facilities, providing a computing service for over 7000 researchers world-wide.

For the future, CERN and other particle physics institutes are working on scaling up this innovative architecture to handle tens of thousands of nodes, and incorporating computational Grid technology to link the CERN environment with other computing facilities, easing access to the colossal quantities of data that will be produced by experiments at the LHC.
SHIFT has proven itself as an invaluable tool for particle physics, but the award requires more than that. As Patrick J. McGovern, Chairman of the Computerworld Honors Program Chairmen's Committee points out, 'Winners of the Computerworld Honors 21st Century Achievement Awards represent those organisations whose use of information technology has been especially noteworthy for the originality of its conception, the breadth of its vision, and the significance of its benefit to society'. With many other fields of research such as biology and Earth observation also anticipating a growing data wave, not to mention the home entertainment industry, it is in the near future that CERN's pioneering work will bring rewards to a wider community.
'This is an important recognition of CERN's excellence in Information Technology,' explained Director-General Luciano Maiani, 'in particular it is a reward for the teams of physicists on the LEP experiments who contributed to the development and implementation of this new architecture. The prize is also an encouragement for the physicists working on the complex challenges of LHC computing.' These sentiments were underlined by Hans Hoffmann, Director of Scientific Computing, who said, 'In addition to its major contribution to physics, CERN has been a consistent innovator in Information Technology, from the Web to its current work on Grid computing. We are delighted with this prize; particularly as it demonstrates recognition for CERN's computing initiatives not from the academic world, but from industry's leading computing experts.'

More information on the Computerworld Honors Programme can be found at http://www.cwheroes.org