Welcome to CHEP 2013

Greetings from CHEP 2013 in a rather wet Amsterdam.

The conference season is upon us and Sam, Andy, Wahid and myself find ourselves in Amsterdam for CHEP 2013. CHEP started here in 1983 and it is hard to believe that it has been 18 months since New York.

As usual the agenda for the next 5 days is packed. Some of the highlights so far have included advanced facility monitoring, the future of C++ and Robert Lupton's excellent talk on software engineering for Science.

As with all of my visits to Amsterdam, the rain is worth mentioning. So much so that it made local news this morning. However, the venue is the rather splendid Beurs van Berlage in central Amsterdam.

CHEP 2013

There will be further updates during the week as the conference progresses.

Busy Year

We haven't posted a great deal this year as there has been a huge amount going on within Scotgrid since January.

The main news this year has been Stuart's departure to Saint Andrews University from the Glasgow Scotgrid Team. Stuart's role within EGI, ROD and Grid Ops as well as the Glasgow site and his development work on MPI at Glasgow says a lot about his rather busy part-time role within Scotgrid. The word Factotum or "make everything" springs to mind when describing his input.
We all wish Stuart the very best at Saint Andrews.

The Glasgow site has suffered from issues with the coolant infrastructure since January. To mitigate this the University is upgrading both the power and air conditioning within the Kelvin Building. This work will include the installation of a Generator and UPS system as well as new air conditioning units. This is a long term project and will be completed by the summer of 2014.

ECDF has performed incredibly well since January and Durham, while suffering from air con and power issues earlier in the year is now relatively stable.

We have brought in additional VOs with the MVLS group at Glasgow University and are presently in discussions with other non-HEP groups such as bio-chemistry. The most technically challenging project is the proposed investigation into the Lairg Magnetic anomaly by the EarthSci group at Glasgow. This project is difficult due to the lack of network connectivity in the area where the data is being generated, we will report on this soon.

Our primary focus of research, outside of running the sites, have covered GPU work at ECDF, more efficient data management and deployment strategies at Glasgow and ECDF. Additionally, how we utilise containerisation and build smarter cluster restart environments has been investigated by Gareth at Glasgow. David Crook's has done excellent work around aggregating the multiple monitoring platforms that have sprung up within the Grid by utilising the Graphite package.

We have attended and presented in multiple conferences and public outreach events including one during the Edinburgh Festival.

So that is up to date in time for CHEP. Which is on this week. Still trying to work out how quickly the last 18 months went.