The SFT (Software for Experiments) group is part of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, http://www.cern.ch), and focuses on providing common software for its experiments. CERN is one of the world’s largest and most exciting centers for fundamental physics research. Experiments at CERN have probed the fundamental nature of matter and the forces which affect it. CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web (http://info.cern.ch), invented by Tim Berners-Lee. The SFT group's efforts, like most of CERN's current activities, are directed towards the world’s highest-energy elementary particle accelerator - the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/lhc-en.html) and its experiments. There are four large experiments at the LHC, which seek to expand the frontiers of knowledge and complete our understanding of the constituents of matter and their interactions, of the conditions in the first instants after the Big Bang and of the differences between matter and anti-matter. During 2012, ATLAS and CMS announced the discovery of a new boson, which has been confirmed recently to have the properties of a Higgs boson - similar to the one required by the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The vast majority of our GSoC projects do not require any physics knowledge. Operating the LHC and running each experiment requires a large amount of software. A large part of this software is common and open source. The open source software spans the range from system software to more specialized physics-oriented tools and toolkits.

The projects to which students can contribute span several software projects: SixTrack, accelerator simulation; the Geant4/Geant-V detector simulation toolkit the ROOT software framework for storing and analyzing the data of the LHC experiments including machine learning software; CERNVM, a baseline Virtual Software Appliance for the participants of CERN LHC experiments. different computer platforms.