CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva, established in 1954.

The organization has twenty European member states, and is currently the workplace of approximately 2,600 full-time employees, as well as some 7,931 scientists and engineers (representing 580 universities and research facilities and 80 nationalities).

CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. Numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations to make use of them.

It is also noted for being the birthplace of the World Wide Web. The main site at Meyrin also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data processing facilities primarily for experimental data analysis, and because of the need to make them available to researchers elsewhere, has historically been (and continues to be) a major wide area networking hub.

As an international facility, the CERN sites are officially under neither Swiss nor French jurisdiction.Member states' contributions to CERN for the year 2008 totalled CHF 1 billion (approximately € 664 million).

Decommissioned accelerators.

* The original linear accelerator (LINAC 1).
* The 600 MeV Synchrocyclotron (SC) which started operation in 1957 and was shut down in 1991.
* The Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR), an early collider built from 1966 to 1971 and operated until 1984.
* The Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP), which operated from 1989 to 2000 and was the largest machine of its kind, housed in a 27 km-long circular tunnel which now houses the Large Hadron Collider.
* The Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR), commissioned in 1982, which assembled the first pieces of true antimatter, in 1995, consisting of nine atoms of antihydrogen. It was closed in 1996, and superseded by the Antiproton Decelerator.

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