TWiki : Case Study: How 10,000 Researchers at CERN Collaborate Using TWiki

CERN, the Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. At the European Laboratory for High Energy Physics, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator is colliding beams of protons at energies of 3.5 TeV, recreating conditions close to those at the origin of the Universe. The four main LHC experiments, Alice, Atlas, CMS and LHCb are complex detectors with millions of output channels. These experiment detectors, large as cathedrals , have been designed, built and are now operated by collaborations of physicists from universities and research institutes spread across the world. Wikis are a perfect match to the collaborative nature of CERN experiments and since TWiki was installed at CERN in 2003 it has grown in popularity, and the statistics from September 2011 show nearly 10,000 registered editors and about 110,000 topics. TWiki runs on Linux machines with the Apache web server and is written in Perl and so was easily installed on typical CERN computers. The TWiki service quickly became popular at CERN following its introduction and as the following figures show the number of users and topics has grown at a steady rate over the past years. Registered users: Sep 2011 TWiki topics at CERN Sep 2011 Use Cases The Atlas collaboration consists of 3000 physicists from more than 174 institutes in 38 countries on 5 continents. These collaborators need efficient means of communicating information. To this end, has enthusiastically embraced TWiki since 2004 and now has over 14,000 web pages some of which are world readable containing technical information about Atlas as well as protected ones for physics preparations and results. New pages are created at a rate of 150/month and averaging over 10,000 updates a month. Atlas creates workbooks with TWiki and the application’s working environment allows their users to contribute to the development and maintenance of the documents. CMS (The Compact Muon Solenoid detector) also uses TWiki for creating software guides and workbooks and makes use of the PDF creation feature that allows a one click creation of an entire book. They also benefit from the dynamic web page creation features and implement virtual blackboards that can be written on by users from all around the world. Both the Atlas and CMS experiment collaborations employ specific review processes to ensure that Wiki content is maintained and current. Certification features are used to ensure document integrity and authors are reminded by email to check the validity of information in their pages, in case it has not been updated by one of their peer researchers. Problems and Solutions Performance and search issues The increasing number of people using TWiki had an effect on the system CPU load and resulted in slower page response times especially for searches. New hardware with more CPU power and memory corrected these performance issues. The TWiki data back end …

(last changed by PeterThoeny)

Original post of TWiki.
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