AARNet and CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) recently signed a formal agreement which establishes a framework for ongoing collaborations to develop cloud storage technologies for the benefit of scientific and education communities globally.

Both organisations share interests in enabling new and more efficient ways of collaborating to support international research endeavours, particularly around innovation for data storage, data transfer and data sharing.

For the past two years, AARNet engineers have been collaborating with the CERN IT Storage Group to test distributed deployments of large-scale storage systems. The AARNet network’s capabilities for moving huge volumes of data across Australia’s vast continent is helping to inform research for advancing networking and data services for science.

AARNet and CERN have also been collaborating to promote the creation of a community of cloud-technology adopters to share innovative solutions and operational best practices, co-organising events such as the CS3 (Cloud Services for Synchronisation and Sharing) conferences and workshops.

Under the new agreement, the organisations will work together on developing solutions, such as the AARNet CloudStor service which is building on CERN’s EOS. The CERNBox and SWAN services will also be part of this collaboration.

All these cloud-based services support the management of data storage, access and analysis for a range of users. EOS is a low latency heavy duty data storage infrastructure designed for the data deluge from Large Hadron Collider high energy physics experiments; CERNBox, is a cloud storage service meeting the unique needs of non-high-energy physics CERN users; SWAN, is a platform for performing interactive data analysis in the cloud via a web browser; and CloudStor is a data sharing and service with a wide range of research applications designed to meet the unique needs of the Australian research community.

Read more about AARNet’s collaborations with CERN

This post has been published on the AARNET website at the following url: https://news.aarnet.edu.au/aarnet-and-cern-sign-mou-for-developing-cloud-storage-technologies/