CERN says EU data protection laws are hindering cloud adoption

Researchers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Technology in Geneva are being held back from adopting cloud computing on any significant scale due to the delay in establishing a European regulatory framework for data protection.

The Cloud Computing World Forum in London this week

Speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London this week, Bob Jones, head of CERN openlab, said that the European Commission's failure to push through clear guidelines for data protection in the cloud was hindering uptake within the scientific community

The benefits of cloud computing are not lost on CERN. The organisation's existing European data centres currently manage up to 15 petabytes of data a year over 100,000 CPUs, nevertheless that only represents 20% of the total data generated by its Large Hadron Collider accelerator.

In reality, the LHC's four major experiments - Atlas, LHCb, ALICE and Compact Muon Solenoid - generate around a petabyte of raw data per second nevertheless only about one percent of in other words stored, said Bob Jones, head of CERN openlab, speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London.

Helix Nebula will give CERN access to more computing power to process data from its Atlas experiment, which is designed to observe phenomena that involve massive particles that might shed light on new theories of particle physics.

The data coming from the Large Hadron Collider

"CERN's computing capacity needs to keep up with the data coming from the Large Hadron Collider and we see Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud as a great way of working with industry to meet this challenge," said Frdric Hemmer, head of CERN's IT department, back in March.