When CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, needed to consolidate its silos of data into a single, 360-degree view of operational data, analytics and self-service reports, it collaborated with Pentaho Corp. to bring order to mass amounts of data for the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.

Derek Mathieson, group leader GS-AIS at CERN, visited with Dave Vellante and George Gilbert, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during PentahoWorld 2015 to talk about the partnership that recently won the organization an excellence award.

Science is a business

Mathieson first clarified that the organization does not use the term “nuclear” anymore due to negative connotations people have with the word. He explained what CERN does in everyday terminology, seeking out to “understand how the universe works, understand the laws of nature.”

But don’t ask Mathieson to smash an atom for you, because he is a software engineer. He can, however, tell you that CERN gathers more than a petabyte of information every second, and its sensors, which Mathieson likens to 3D cameras, detect about 400 million photographs per second. “Our job is to make the infrastructure run to make sure we can run the lab as a business,” he said.

Simplifying the chaos

It is a complex business. CERN has a community of 15,000+ physicists using the organization’s infrastructure and $1 billion in research money entrusted to it. Mathieson also clarified that CERN dedicates more than half of the billion dollars to infrastructure in order to put information at people’s fingertips.

So creating transparency and access to information is the priority for his team. “The physicists adhere to very exacting and strict requirements, so we need to make the business intelligence work the same way,” he explained. The project with Pentaho will enable a 360-view of all data for the community while providing it in a secure environment.

The next layer

The next layer will be to optimize the data and get as close to real-time reporting as possible. CERN plans to use Pentaho for predictive analytics (to react quickly to information), governance, transportation information, fraud detection and much more.

Click here to learn more about 2015 Pentaho Excellence Award Winners.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE