CERN laid out in open access 300 TB of data, Linux virtual machine CERN 6 and analysis tools
This weekend, CERN pleased physicists from all over the world by publishing publicly available 300 terabytes of data from the collider. Students and schoolchildren can download this data and use it for coursework and laboratory work. Perhaps some amateur will even discover hidden correlations that have escaped the attention of CERN specialists.
The reasons for such a decision were explained by Kati Lassila-Perini, who works on a compact muon solenoid detector.: “After we have exhausted our data analysis capabilities, we see no reason why not to make them available to everyone,” she said. - There are numerous benefits: starting with the fact that they will fuel the interest of high school students in science, and ending with the training of specialists in the physics of elementary particles of tomorrow. And for me personally, as the coordinator of the data storage project for a compact muon solenoid, this is an important part of ensuring the availability of our research data. ”
The data itself was obtained during the experiments of 2011, mainly from the collision of protons with an energy of 7 teraelectronvolt. During such collisions a great number of rare elementary particles are generated, which fly apart in different directions and are recorded by the detectors.
CERN provides tools for processing and analyzing data . There is a ready-made CernVM virtual machine with Linux operating system CERN 6 and all installed programs. The virtual machine opens in VirtualBox or another manager under Linux or Windows. Selected open source CERN tools are published in the repository on Github .
Links to all data sets and programs are collected on the CMS Open Data page.. There is raw data without processing in the AOD (Analysis Object Data) format, simulation data for the 2011 experiments in the AODSIM format, and examples of simplified data sets for use in various applications and for analysis.
Last time, CERN published data from experiments in open access in November 2014 : then 27 terabytes, collected in 2010, were uploaded.