CernVM Ecosystem

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The SFT group develops elements of the CernVM ecosystem. It consists of several components:

  • CernVM-FS is a network file system optimised for large scale software distribution. It is based on HTTP and optimized to deliver experiment software in a fast, scalable, and reliable way. Among the other users, LHC experiments rely on CernVM-FS. Files and file metadata are aggressively cached and downloaded on demand. Thereby the CernVM-FS decouples the life cycle management of the application software releases from the operating system. To download CernVM-FS please go to the download page, the technical report on CernVM-FS is available here, and the review of CernVM-FS from the security perspective can be obtained from this page.
  • CernVM is a baseline Virtual Software Appliance for the participants of CERN LHC experiments. The Appliance represents a complete, portable and easy to configure user environment for developing and running LHC data analysis locally and on institutional and commercial clouds (OpenStack, Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine), independently of Operating System software and hardware platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS). The goal is to remove a need for the installation of the experiment software and to minimize the number of platforms (compiler-OS combinations) on which experiment software needs to be supported and tested.