CERN gives away 300TB of sweet research data

Last week, the European Organization for nuclear Research (CERN) released 300TB worth of data to the public. The data includes over 100TB of proton collisions alone from 7 TeV (the Large Hadron Collider).

This release is over half of the data collected during tests in 2011.

The data has been released in two different variations: the ‘primary datasets,’ which is the same format used by CMS Collaboration (CERN researchers) to perform research, and the ‘derived datasets,’ which is available in a limited number, but is accessible to high school and university students for analysis.

According to a CMS physicist at CERN, Kati Lassila-Perini, the data is released to the public once in-house researchers have combed over it. This is to ‘inspire’ others, such as high school students, into physics. It’s also a way to preserve the data.

Read more: CERN finds particle consistent with Higgs Boson

“Members of the CMS Collaboration put in lots of effort and thousands of person-hours each of service work in order to operate the CMS detector and collect these research data for our analysis,” says Lassila-Perini.

Along with all of this information, protocols and software to generate simulations — a crucial part in analysing the primary datasets – is also available. This can be downloaded from the CMS portal.

This release dwarfs the previous data release from 2014, which was over 27TB in size. In contained information from research conducted in 2010.

The data is available on the CERN Open Data Portal. A word of advice: don’t try to download any of this on South African ADSL lines. You’ll be throttled in a day.

Feature image: Elias Bizannes via Flickr