CERN

CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research; French: Organisation europeenne pour la recherche nucleaire) is an intergovernmental scientific organization and the world's largest particle physics laboratory. It was founded on September 29, 1954, and is headquartered in Meyrin near Geneva, on the Swiss-French border. The acronym CERN comes from its original name, Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire. The organization has 25 member states (the only non-European full member is Israel, since 2013). In 2024 it employed 2,704 scientific, technical and administrative staff and hosted about 12,400 users from institutions in over 80 countries; its 2026 budget is 1,515 million Swiss francs. CERN's flagship facility is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. CERN is also hugely significant for computing: it is where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, and the organization pioneered TCP/IP adoption in Europe and the development of grid computing (the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid) to process petabytes of data. Today CERN makes heavy use of machine learning and AI for analyzing experimental data. Its Director-General is Mark Thomson.