Can OpenStack and hybrid cloud computing explain the origins of the universe? Maybe not on their own, but they will be helping starting today as part of a partnership between Rackspace (RAX), the OpenStack-based cloud-computing host, and the CERN openlab collaborative group to process Big Data in the cloud.

Best known for its Large Hadron Collider—and the fears it stoked a few years ago about blowing up the Earth—CERN is the home of the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. CERN openlab, meanwhile, is a related initiative involving collaboration between CERN scientists and industry partners for testing new technologies.

Through the agreement with Rackspace, CERN openlab will deploy the company’s Open Hybrid Cloud and OpenStack, the opensource cloud computing platform, to meet its Big Data needs. The objective is to build “a reference architecture and operational model for federated cloud services between the Rackspace Private Cloud, Rackspace Public Cloud and CERN’s OpenStack powered clouds,” Rackspace said in a statement.

As befits the planet’s largest particle physics laboratory, the CERN openlab cloud will also be one of the largest hybrid clouds in the world once it is fully implemented. According to a Rackspace representative, the initiative will involve “a huge amount of research with multiple clouds and data centers” and is expected “to reach around 15,000 hypervisors and 150,000 virtual machines by 2015.”

The deal may help explain why Rackspace executives a couple of weeks ago were so loudly proclaiming the benefits of the hybrid cloud, and predicting its imminent rise to dominance over other types of cloud computing. The CERN openlab partnership for a hybrid cloud is an even bigger one than the major agreement Rackspace announced in June with Fidelity Investments.

Rackspace can also perhaps take a bit of pride in its collaboration with CERN, whose contributions to open technologies, such as the kind on which Rackspace hosting is built, have been some of the most vital and innovative in the history of computing. In particular, it was at CERN that the World Wide Web first emerged in 1989, and it was CERN’s decision to put that technology in the public domain that assured the development of the Internet as we know it. So who can blame it if it ends up destroying the world?