Speakers: Ben Segal

Session

Creativity and Coincidence - CERN, the Web and the Internet

The surprising story of how the Web emerged quite unexpectedly from one of the smallest and weakest parts of the CERN hierarchy.

Bio

I'm British, graduated in Physics and Mathematics in 1958 from Imperial College London, then worked for 7 years on fast breeder reactor development, first for the UK Atomic Energy Authority and later in the USA for the Detroit Edison Company. In 1971 I finished a Ph.D. at Stanford University in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering. I then joined CERN in Geneva where I worked until my formal retirement at the end of May 2002.

Except for a sabbatical in 1977, when I worked at Bell Northern Research in Palo Alto on a PABX development project (and encountered Unix for the first time), all my work at CERN involved computer networks as well as an early satellite data transmission system.

My most significant achievement was the coordinated introduction of the Internet Protocols at CERN (1985-89) which helped to pave the way for Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web at CERN (1989-91).

The second most significant was being a member of the small team which from 1990 developed the "SHIFT" system, which changed the way computing is done at CERN - from using central mainframes to distributed Unix clusters - and today thousands of Linux PC's connected worldwide into a so-called computer Grid.

The last major area to which I contributed was the European DataGrid Project, especially the part concerned with Data Management.

Over the past 25 years I have taught courses on Unix, distributed computing and Internet protocols in many places outside CERN, both in "developing" countries (e.g. China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba) and not-so-developing ones (Italy, Sweden, UK, etc.).

As an early member of the Internet Society (ISOC), I participated in setting up the ISOC Geneva Chapter in 1995. I also set up its Development Special Interest Group ("Geneva DevSIG") to assist developing country access to the Internet.

Since retirement, as an honorary CERN staff member, I help out with some IT Department projects, including the exciting LHC@home effort which uses the BOINC volunteer computing infrastructure to harness large amounts of computing power to help design CERN's new LHC accelerator. With some additional financing from outside CERN we extended this work to harness computing power for work on disease control in Africa - see Africa@home and the MalariaControl project. We recently taught BOINC technology to 35 African students from 18 African countries in a workshop held in Muizenberg, South Africa, in July 2007.

I am continuing to work in this exciting area as I believe that "volunteer computing" has great potential for public involvement in science practice and education.