There is misconception that the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, purely focuses on scientific research and experimentation. In reality, CERN’s infrastructure team is hard-pressed to deliver cutting-edge technology to its research scientists, as well as its own business operations teams.

“We’re an infrastructure organization who provides all the technology, all the science. And all the scientists and engineers come to CERN to do their work — but CERN itself provides the facilities. So our main focus … is technology,” said Derek Mathieson (pictured), group leader at CERN. 

Mathieson spoke with hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE MEdia’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent PentahoWorld event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed CERN’s state-of-the-art infrastructure stack. (* Disclosure below.)

Collaboration and openness in the scientific community

CERN operates with a more than $1 billion budget subsidized by governments around the world. This affords the organization the latest in on-premises computing hardware. As such, Mathieson’s primary responsibility is to tap into this infrastructure to run CERN’s business operations without slowing down the scientific research.

“There’s a hundred thousand CPUs in our computer center. That’s mainly used for doing physics. But because we have all this infrastructure there, we can use part of it to also run the administration, which gives us the ability to run a real world-class technology stack to actually run the organization,” Mathieson said. 

As a Hitachi Vantara customer, the open-source aspect of Hitachi’s Pentaho big data integration and analytics product appeals to CERN’s mission of collaborative scientific research. And it allows the infrastructure team to make customizations to suit their needs without building the stack from scratch. The team goes as far as building the supporting infrastructure so that other internal organizations can leverage their own in-house solutions.

“Open-source software allows us to build on things which are already solid. We don’t need to make another one of them. We’ll make something on top of it. That’s the primary message we try to give,” Mathieson said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of PentahoWorld. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for PentahoWorld. Neither Hitachi Vantara, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE