 Last week, an event was held at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland,to mark the launch of Helix Nebula’s new cloud-computing marketplace. ‘Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud Initiative’ is a pioneering partnership between big science and big business in Europe, which charts the course towards the sustainable provision of cloud computing for science. Now, through a cutting-edge collaboration between commercial providers and public e-infrastructures, including GÉANT and the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), the Helix Nebula Marketplace offers a first-of-its-kind production service to meet the needs of researchers and facilitate innovation in science. “Science today is in a process of very fast, radical change,” explains Zoran Stančič, deputy director general of the European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content, and Technology (DG CONNECT). “We need to support advancements in e-science at both a European and a global level.” Frédéric Hemmer, head of CERN’s IT department, agrees: “CERN is exploring the origins of our universe, but without the appropriate IT infrastructures — to deal with the large volumes of data produced by the LHC experiments — none of this research could be done.” |