Big Data - CERN releases 300 Terabytes Research Data - Free
Alan Brown
Helping research scientists extract maximum value from data by applying artificial intelligence & autoML.
Big Data - Sources of High Quality Free Data Online
There is a significant amount of free data available on the internet, some of high quality. This article, describes one of the major sources; subsequent articles will describe others.
CERN, The European Organisation for Particle Physics Research based in Geneva, Switzerland conducts fundamental physics research with numerous large scale experiments, including LHC - Large Hadron Collider.
CERN provides access to hundreds of terabytes of high quality data. Some of this data is raw data, but much has been pre-processed into an easily accessible form for researchers of big data and students. The volume of data available is very large, currently in excess of 300 Terabytes, fortunately it is not necessary to analyse all this in one go. One may choose individual experiments and datasets to evaluate the tools and data.
Also CERN provide some free software to assist and guide analysis of the data.
Datasets currently available include:
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is a heavy-ion detector designed to study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a phase of matter called quark-gluon plasma forms
The ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC-ApparatuS) experiment is a general function detector exploring topics like the properties of the Higgs-like particle, also extra dimensions of space, and unification of fundamental forces. It further seeks evidence for dark matter candidates in the Universe.
The LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) is an experiment aiming to record the decay of particles containing b and anti-b quarks. These are known as B mesons. The detector is designed to gather detailed information about the identity, trajectory, momentum and other properties of each particle.
CERN Virtual Machines enable you to run a custom Scientific Linux on any operating system and access certain CERN working environments and software tools.
The science initiative enables Universities, individual researchers, students and schools to try big data technology on real scientific data with the opportunity to contribute to real research.
Some derived datasets are provided and these “derived datasets” require a lot less computing power and may be readily analysed by university or high-school students.
Alan Brown, Software Architect, Tendron Systems Ltd
References:
CERN - Open Data Portal