CERN says EU data protection laws are hindering cloud adoption

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.

"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.

Jones said that CERN now plans to embark on a two-year pilot phase, which will involve moving data between commercial cloud data centres and its own publicly funded data centres. He emphasised that CERN has no plans to give up its existing systems, but wants to create a hybrid cloud ecosystem marrying the two together.

During the pilot phase, flagship projects will be deployed in order to analyse functionality and performance. Jones said that, with CERN currently consuming 150,000 CPUs continuously and simultaneously, it was not clear whether the cloud would be able to scale to its needs.

Also speaking at the conference, Megan Richards, Deputy Director General of Information Society and Media for the European Commission, said that new data protection legislation is currently passing through the European Parliament, and the proposals will be finalised within the next year come into effect within the next two and a half years.