Grid Security & Scientific Computing at CERN

Global high-energy and nuclear physics experiments at CERN rely on federated computing grids managing petabytes of collision data alongside compute-intensive Monte Carlo particle transport codes. From 2010 to 2012, my research at CERN focused on verifiable security for worldwide distributed storage in the ALICE experiment and fast exact sampling algorithms for nuclear simulations:

• Zero-Trust Grid Storage Authorization & Delegation (AliEn): Operating across 85+ WLCG sites, 30,000+ compute nodes, and 200 PB of storage, AliEn’s original file access protocol trusted client-reported metadata and exposed storage elements to unauthorized alteration. We designed the LFN Booking Table for atomic transient-state tracking and storage-signed xrootd envelopes that cut credential size by up to 50% in AliEn v2.18–v2.20 (ACAT 2011a), paired with X.509 proxy-certificate delegation and access control for grid web services and locality-aware pilot jobs (ACAT 2011b).
• Multidimensional Correlated Alias Sampling (NuDY): To accelerate Monte Carlo simulations of accelerator-driven fission systems and nuclear fuel cycles over ENDF cross-section libraries, we built unified nuclear data-processing routines bridging high-energy cascade and low-energy neutron transport regimes and generalized Walker’s constant-time O(1) alias method to correlated multidimensional probability distributions with nonzero covariance (ACAT 2012).