What you say is what she is now claiming to have meant, after the whole of Italy has been laughing at her. Unfortunately for her, and for us all Italians, there is no possible denying, what was written in the press release literally and unequivocally means "tunnel between CERN and Gran Sasso, across which the experiment took place".

There is no possible misinterpretation, and the phrase literally means "To the construction of the tunnel between CERN and the Gran Sasso laboratories". No cultural context, definition or whatever. "Tunnel" is a commonly used word in Italian, with the exact same meaning - an approximately horizontal hole in the ground.

I second the comments of Nite_Hawk. I should add that the other big question you'll face is monitoring and alerting; look at Ganglia and Nagios/Icinga.

Our team manages the Online/DAQ system of the ATLAS experiment at CERN, about 2000 PCs. Central configuration is of course a must; we use Scientific Linux CERN 5 and netbooted, single image for most "worker" nodes, with specialisation done after boot by an in-house scripting system; servers and other special purpose systems are managed via Quattor or Puppet. Quattor is used a lot at CERN, I find that it is less flexible and requires more work than Puppet but its (currently) stronger package management gives better guarantees of uniformity. Netbooting a single image is excellent to guarantee that all systems are the same and you just need to reboot to be like on a new clean install; but it's a lot of work to setup and maintain, so it's only justified over large numbers.

Personally I also manage the grid cluster at University of Johannesburg (~30 nodes) and there I'm using Cobbler and Puppet, they do a nice job and don't take too much effort.

PS shmux is your friend :-)

On the same vein, all CERN things could also be said to be from EDF scientists, since CERN is powered by electrons coming from EDF (the French electricity company).

Of course. Tigers are outdated. Leopard's the name of the new threat.