CERN Summer Thrills GSoC 2012

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For the physics software development group at CERN, our second year of Google Summer of Code couldn’t have come at a better time. Motivated by CernVM's awesome experience in 2011, our colleagues from the Geant4 and ROOT software projects joined us as mentors this summer. And while physicists around the world snatched the first evidence of a long-sought Higgs boson from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), our seven Google Summer of Code students worked on core parts of the open source software engine that makes LHC data processing possible.

Two of our students worked with the Geant4 team at CERN. Geant4 is a toolkit for the simulation of the response of a material when high-energetic particles are passing through it. Geant4 can be used to model a gas detector, a gamma-ray telescope, an electronic device next to an accelerator or the inside of a satellite. In order to keep up with the rate of real data coming from the LHC detectors, Geant4 has to be both accurate and fast.  


Two more students were working together with the ROOT team. The ROOT framework is the main working horse for LHC experiments to store, analyze, and visualize their data.  

For the CernVM base technology, we had three more students working with us this summer. CernVM provides a virtual appliance used to develop and run LHC data processing applications on the distributed and heterogeneous computing infrastructure that is provided by hundreds of physics institutes and research labs around the world.  

Overall, we were very glad to see so much interest and enthusiasm from the student programmers in LHC software tools. We’d like to congratulate all of our students on their hard work and on successfully completing the program!

Sun, 09/30/2012 - 00:00 By Jakob Blomer, CERN Organization Administrator (original article on Google Open Source Blog)