At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter—the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives clues to physicists about how the particles interact and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light, before they are made to collide. This produces 27 petabytes of data every year, which is recorded and analyzed by thousands of computers in the CERN data centre.

With an upgrade to the LHC in 2015 to nearly double the collision energy, it was clear that further computing resources were needed. To provide the additional capacity and be more responsive to the users, a new approach was needed. In 2012, a small team at CERN started looking at OpenStack, a piece of open source software, to create computing clouds. It was a very promising technology with an enthusiastic community but a significant level of complexity. Along with the code being very new, those were very early days for the documentation and training. We wanted to educate people rapidly to start the project and so looked for guides to make the new administrators productive. This was when we encountered the first edition of the book, OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook. It became the standard document for newcomers in the team to understand the concepts, set up their first clouds, and then start work on the CERN cloud.

As the cloud evolved and the OpenStack technology matured, we continued to use this guide, even as the members of the team rotated, building small clouds to try out new concepts and investigate the flexibility of cloud computing.

Over the years, I have frequently met Kevin, Cody and Egle at the OpenStack summits that give the community an opportunity to meet and exchange experiences. With OpenStack evolving so rapidly, it also gives an opportunity to get the latest editions of the cookbook, which they have continued to keep up to date.

The CERN cloud is now in production across two data centers in Geneva and Budapest, with over 3,000 servers running tens of thousands of virtual machines. With new staff members joining frequently, we continue to use the cookbook as a key part of the team's training and look forward to the updates in the latest edition.

Tim Bell

Infrastructure Manager, CERN