It's more along the lines of an international lab. Many, perhaps most, of the academics working there are still employed by their home institutions and are funded just as if they were working in a lab in their own university.
In fact, the same can be said for some of the academics working in national labs.
National lab, international lab, whatever. Point is that CERN is still more like a large, government-supported lab than a university.
What's happening at CERN is not at all reflective of the university environment of the OP, which emphasizes small collaborations working on, say, million-dollar projects lasting 3-5 years. As we both know, CERN is nothing like this.
I commented because the idea of saying that the work at CERN is "university research", as was done in the comment above, is mistaken. CERN has no relation to the work done by the OP.
