OREANDA-NEWS. April 10, 2012.  Yandex (YNDX), Russia’s leading search engine, has announced the launch of a search tool service for retrieving Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Events at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. A search tool custom-built by Yandex has been tested for one of four big particle detector experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator.

Yandex’s search service has been designed specifically for the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment (LHCb) studying the interactions of b-hadrons, heavy particles containing the bottom quark, also known as the beauty quark. The detector registers particle collisions, or events, with the data being stored for further research. The amount of information accumulated every year may reach thousands of terabytes, which makes it quite difficult to retrieve specific event types. Yandex has provided the LHCb core software with an instant access to the details of any specific event. The newly launched search service has already indexed the information about more than one billion particle collisions.

“It’s a pleasure to work with the European Organization for Nuclear Research, as we welcome any opportunity to apply our technologies across different fields. Also, it’s nice to do something useful for physics and basic science. We will keep refining our LHCb event search, which may take us to the stage where we could contribute to other experiments at CERN,” says Ilya Segalovich, Yandex’s CTO.

“The computing team of the LHCb experiment has evaluated LHCb Event Index developed by Yandex and has found it very useful. The LHCb datasets consist of several billions events that are typically analyzed sequentially to select events satisfying specific selection criteria. Retrieving particular types of events can take several hours on large computer farms. The search engine developed by Yandex allows us to find what we need within seconds. Geared specifically to our needs, this search system allows us to save both time and resources and it can greatly help our research,” says Dr. Pierluigi Campana, LHCb Spokesperson.

Yandex and CERN started their collaboration in 2011 when the LHCb experiment used the Russian company’s servers for part of the experiment’s data simulation production. In the first three months of 2012, Yandex supplied 13% of the total computing resources used by the LHCb data simulation.