Telecom World 2009 took place at Geneva's Palexpo on 5–9 October. This high-profile internationally renowned show, organised by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), attracts visitors from the public and private sectors sharing a common interest in information technologies and communication. While the show was significantly smaller than in previous years, Asia and Africa were strongly represented.
Why did CERN participate?
The theme of Telecom World 2009 was "open networks, connected minds" and CERN perfectly matches this with its worldwide distributed community of scientists and its long-standing leading role in applying networks for scientific collaboration. In fact, CERN has participated in previous Telecom events, notably in 2003, where the land-speed record in long-distance data transmission over 10 Gb/s was demonstrated. Today this technology is readily available and the next-generation optical links are starting to appear.
For this Telecom 2009 event we also wanted to highlight CERN's integration in the local area and teamed up with "Lake Geneva Region", who organised a 700 m2 stand hosting several established companies as well as a group of start-up companies from the area.
When we first planned the event in spring 2009, we expected that the LHC would be running, so we wanted to show the machine and the experiments in action. A console similar to the one in the CERN Control Centre was set up and equipped with seven screens and a full-HD videoconferencing unit. This console was directly connected to the CERN intranet via an extension of the optical fibre supplied by the Geneva "Services Industriels" (SIG), providing a connection speed of 10 Gb/s. The set-up was installed and tested entirely at CERN, even using a fibre link from CERN to Palexpo and back, to avoid any last-minute surprises.
The project was supported by colleagues from IT, BE and PH, bringing in their expertise in setting up the stand, the computing equipment and the demonstrations. We showed various video clips, collections of photos from the LHC and the experiments, and the LHC computing. We also linked the console to the CMS distributed control centre and followed the preparation for cosmic muon data-taking live.
What happened during the week?
While Telecom saw fewer visitors than expected, CERN's stand proved to be one of the show's most popular attractions. People were keen to find out about the LHC restart and they were curious about the computing and communication environment put into place to deal with the extraordinary amount of data. The presence of the WLCG Globe was a useful eye catcher, but because science fiction is sometimes more attractive and better known by the general public, we were happy to display one of the three original antimatter bottles from the film Angels and Demons, based on the book by Dan Brown. This definitely attracted additional people.
Members of the experiments, and people from the BE and IT departments took turns on the stand to answer the many questions raised by the videos, diagrams and monitoring interfaces presented. Over the course of the week, three lectures were held in the "Lake Geneva Region" auditorium, presenting CERN in more detail, along with the LHC and the collaborative tools developed at CERN. The lectures were streamed live on a CERN webcast and the recordings are now available on the website of CERN's partner for the event, Swiss start-up firm Klewel (www.klewel.ch).
State-of-the-art tools
Although well known to the HEP community, the Indico software has never been presented outside of the academic network before, and this was an excellent opportunity to reveal its numerous features to the world. We showed how you can have access to managing lectures, meetings and big conferences at your fingertips via Indico's shiny new web interface (described in the previous issue of CNL).
The lecture was also a great occasion to demonstrate brand new features such as the booking of collaboration resources (Evo meetings, Multipoint Control Unit videoconferences) and the request for video services (video recording, live webcast) directly from Indico. These new features have been made exclusively available to CERN users since mid-October.
Eye-catching Grid with worldwide reach
The computing Grid's new visual display tool developed by a team of engineers from the IT Department's Grid Support Group also captured the public's attention. By coupling the Google Earth interface to the "Dashboard" (a system overseeing the various computing activities of the LHC experiments), this tool provides a visualization of the data flow and the jobs submitted via the Grid over the past 10 minute time period.
During two of the lectures we used CERN's "Multipoint Control Unit" videoconferencing system and two terminals provided by Tandberg to connect live to our partners in Taiwan, India, Moscow, Germany and France. This enabled the 10 partner centres around the world to take part and interact in real time with the visitors, exemplifying the international nature of collaboration found at CERN.