The Higgs appears

This year we haven't been great at keeping up with blog posts but there are many reasons behind this. We have installed a new network, additional cores taking us up to 4000 available job slots and have upgraded the server infrastructure throughout  GU Scotgrid's cluster. Also, we have fallen foul of infrastructure issues and have had problems with the old and replacement Air Con systems. Slowly, we are extracting ourselves from these issues and  recently Professor David Britton gave a lecture on the Grids role in the announcement made in July of this year at CERN during this years Turing Festival. A surprise appearance at the event was Professor Higgs himself.

Professors David Britton (left) and Professor Peter Higgs

Also presenting at the event were Professors Tejinder Singh Virdee and John Ellis of Imperial College and Dr Ben Segal from CERN. The event was one of the kickstart activites for the Turing Festival and enabled the public and academics to get a better over view of what has been involved in getting the experiments this far.

Stockholm LHCONE Meeting

Kristall in the Sergels Torg Stockholm

We were in attendance at the LHCONE  meeting at KTH in Stockholm last week. The purpose of this collaboration is to investigate the efficient use of networks globally for LHC research. As usual it was an excellent meeting where the technical mechanisms for current and future network deployments were discussed and considered.

The agenda can be found here. Some of the highlights of the meeting included an excellent presentation by Erwin Laure on the Swedish and Scandinavian Super Computing and Grid computing infrastructure, Joe Mambretti's presentation on the GLORIAD global research network, Mike O'Connor's discussion on the technical configurations required to avoid asymmetric routing issues between the LHCONE and the current production networks and  Domenico Vicinanza's presentation on Perfsonar MDM.

In addition to these presentations technical discussions surrounding various technologies surrounding bandwidth reservation, ultra high speed networking and  Open Flow technologies were held. As these discussions develop through the network architecture groups we will keep you up to date. 


Also, the weather in Stockholm was exceptional and the KTH Campus is worth a visit for its architecture alone. I would like to thank our hosts and all the other attendees for making this such an enjoyable and informative couple of days.

 KTH Campus Stockholm

 

GridPP At The Top Of Europe

This news article appeared on the GridPP website and is worth reposting to our blog as it gives an overview of the collaborations efforts to date within the WLCG and with the Non High Energy Physics (HEP) communities.
GridPP At The Top Of Europe

WLCG Workshop

There's a lot on the agenda page, and Jamie's CHEP summary talk is a useful round up, but here are my highlights:

• GDB consider services necessary for WLCG operations to basically have been delivered, but not fully deployed (far less extensively tested and battle hardened). My own feeling is that in the integration and mutual interaction (e.g., VOMS and SRM v2.2) of all these services with WLCG production we've still a long way to go.
• In their pre-acceptance tests, the gLite-CE and the CREAM CE did about as well as one another. Given that CREAM has a simpler internal architecture and is more standards compliant it has been chosen over the gLite-CE (which is "no longer being developed"). It's anticipated that CREAM will be first delivered to production in the New Year, but that in total it's anticipated to take about a year from now before it's fully hardened, sites have experience in running it and the YAIM configuration is fully working - oh! just around data taking time ;-) However... this seems rather sensible to me to have settled on the one CE, rather than the unsatisfactory situation of having 2 on the go. Pity the poor folk who put effort into actually running gLite CE as a service!
• Operations: We still have trouble sharing knowledge. 2007 was the year of the grid blog, but only a fool would pretend that will solve all our problems. I proposed a wiki plugin, where articles less than a month old would be black on white, with the text gradually fading to paler shades of grey the longer the article was unrevised. When it reaches white the article is expired!
• SAM is the test framework for everyone. Experiments should publish their tests into SAM so that it's a one-stop-shop for sites' status.
  
• Monitoring: We look forward to a proper demo of the SAM/nagios framework at EGEE.
• SRM v2.2: Confusion still abounds. What spaces to ATLAS want at T2s? Not even they know yet...
• Dress Rehersals: Lots going on for every experiment. See their presentations for more details.
• Common Computing Readiness Challenge (CCRC): There's an urgent need to tests the whole of the Accelerator->T0->T1->T2 chain for all experiments before real data flows. This will probably happen in February (limited, because not everything will be ready) and in May (really, has to work!). I expect this to be quite a big deal for everyone, especially the May round.
  
• ATLAS Session: Good information on Production Dashboard, DDM dashboard and operations (with cool http queries).