CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is one of the world’s largest and most exciting centres for fundamental physics research. CERN is also famous for being the place where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Most of the activities at CERN are currently directed towards operating the world’s biggest elementary particle accelerator - the LHC (Large Hadron Collider).

The CERN Virtual Machine (CernVM) is an R&D project established in the Software group of CERN’s Physics Department (PH/SFT) to investigate how virtualization technologies can be used to improve and simplify the daily interaction of scientists with application software frameworks and the Grid infrastructure. CernVM maintains a Virtual Software Appliance designed to provide a complete and portable environment for developing and running LHC data analysis applications on any end user computer (laptop, desktop), as well as on the Grid and on Clouds.