Yandex has announced its participation in the preparation of an experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to confirm the existence of dark matter, RBC daily reports. Yandex is to provide scientists at CERN with big data processing technology and human resources.
The Yandex School of Data Analysis (SDA) has partnered with CERN and will assist the organization with technology related to machine learning and distributed processing. In turn, CERN scientists will work with students and researchers from SDA.
The CERN experiment is known as SHIP, which stands for Search for Hidden Particles. Researchers are attempting to find heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) using the Large Hadron Collider. The existence of the particles was predicted by theoretical physicist Mikhail Shaposhnikov in 2005.
HNLs are presumed to be a component of dark matter, the existence of which has yet to been proven. If researchers can find a particle confirming its presence, the Standard Model of particle physics, currently the main theoretical construct to describe the universe, will be significantly expanded.
The SHIP project currently exists only a plan. Tts approval is expected in 2015. Preparation for the experiment will last at least seven years and will involve CERN, the University of Zurich, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Naples and Imperial College London.
“Our plans are to use cloud computing and virtualization technologies in the SHIP experiment to create a more transparent, flexible and sustainable infrastructure for data analysis,” RBC reported citing Yandex. “Greater emphasis will be placed on the generation of simulated data: SHIP will use arrays generated in the simulator to run most of the data analysis.”
Since 2011, Yandex has collaborated with CERN on a number of different projects by providing the organization with access to their servers. In 2012, the company developed a search service that CERN used in the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) to study matter and antimatter asymmetry in the interactions of b-quarks.
“The technology that was used in the LHCb related to data processing algorithms,” a Yandex representative explained. “For SHIP it will be used for storage and data generation. Those developments in data analysis we proposed for LHCb will be advantageous for the new experiment.”
Yandex stated that a number of its technologies related storage, retrieval and distributed data processing, data streams, data analysis algorithms, pattern recognition and machine learning technology can be applied to scientific tasks.
