Thursday, February 15, 2007

My fourth talk in Australia was the School of Physics Colloquium. Here was a chance to move away from the storage and data management focus, and deliver a much more general EGEE/LHC talk, which I entitled "Enabling Grids for eScience: How to build a working grid".

As ever, the RTM is a great start - it's such an attractive visualisation of the grid. This time I had no trouble getting it to work on my mac, although it only ever uses the primary display, so I had to put my laptop into mirror display mode, then flip back to two screens for the talk - a minor niggle.

I tried to speak about EGEE in a general way, introducing the project, the services delivered - even a slide on the "Life of a Job", problems commonly seen and operational aspects. The idea was to introduce the grid to potential users, rather than site admins or service providers. This seemed to go pretty well - no one obviously fell asleep (!) and there were a number of questions about EGEE and other grids, job efficiencies and data volumes. Later some of the graduate students complimented me on a good talk, so it must have been pitched at the right level.

I had intended to mention Byzantine Generals, but it slipped my mind. Single points of failure, eh...

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