ScienceBox allows one to deploy CERN services on a Kubernetes cluster by means of Helm charts to deploy the services. The services used are EOS which is a scalable storage solution developed at CERN, CERNBOX which is cloud sync and share system used at CERN, SWAN which is a CERN platform to perform interactive data analysis in the cloud with Jupyter Notebooks and CVMFS, which is a software distribution service to let SWAN use centrally-maintained software stacks.
History and Use Cases
ScienceBox was created in 2017 by the IT Storage Group to bring CERN technology to the Next Generation Digital Learning Environment for secondary school students (EU-funded Up2University project).
ScienceBox was used to test interactive data analysis scenarios for the TOTEM experiment with new interface (RDataFrame) and SPARK task management. This instance was deployed on Open Telekom Cloud (T-Systems) in the context of Helix Nebula Science Cloud Pilot.
It was also deployed in production on AWS as part of the OpenUp2U platform with free access for European schools during the 2020 lockdown. More recently, ScienceBox was used by the CS4OD and Onboard projects. Other deployments are in progress.
ScienceBox has been used to deploy an ad-hoc analysis service for dedicated workshops where not all participants could have a CERN account (ROOT Workshops, CERN School of Computing and others).
It can be used as an engagement tool to demonstrate how to setup a scaled-down copy of CERN production services in a couple of minutes from scratch on a laptop. In the same way it can be installed as a seed of a new large scale service deployed in any data center or in a cloud.
More details in the ScienceBox presentation at the CS3 2022.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is located at the heart of Europe, astride the Franco-Swiss border. It is known not only for its flagship project (the Large Hadron Collider or LHC), but also for being the place where Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989.