Python at CERN

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is producing 600 million collisions every second. Only 1 in a million collisions is interesting. It requires a fast programming language to analyze and filter this amount of data. Is Python such a language? No, it’s not. Does it mean there is no place for Python in one of the largest scientific facilities in the world? Quite the contrary. The ease of use and a very low learning curve makes Python a perfect programming language for many physicists and other people without the computer science background. CERN does not only produce large amounts of data. The interesting bits of data have to be stored, analyzed, shared and published. Work of many scientists across various research facilities around the world has to be synchronized. This is the area where Python flourishes. And with CERN’s pursuit to create and use open source software, many interesting projects were born. To facilitate the analysis of data, ROOT framework [https://root.cern.ch/] was created. It’s a C++ framework focused on big data processing, statistical analysis, visualization and storage. It has been around for more than 20 years, but since nowadays more and more scientists have at least basic Python knowledge, the PyROOT project [https://root.cern.ch/pyroot] was born. PyROOT is a Python extension module that allows users to interact with ROOT from Python interpreter. It combines the ease of use of Python with the powerful capabilities of the ROOT framework. All the discoveries, small and big ones, results in thousands of publications that has to go through the whole publication workflow. For that purpose, a digital library framework called Invenio was created [http://invenio-software.org/]. It can be used to easily build your own fully customized digital library, institutional repository, multimedia archive, or research data repository on the web. Some examples of websites build with Invenio are: https://zenodo.org/, https://cds.cern.ch/ or https://analysispreservation.cern.ch/. Another of CERN’s missions is to share the knowledge, and that can be done through various lectures, workshops and conferences. All those events can easily be organized with the help of Indico [http://indico-software.org/]. Indico comes also with a room booking module and can be easily integrated with various collaborative tools.