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Mon 19 Jul 2010
Edinburgh Compute and Data Facility (ECDF) is a large local computing resource for hundreds of researchers at Edinburgh University engaged in pursuits from across the academic spectrum such as analysing brain scans to understanding mental illness and exploring the dynamics of complex chemical systems. The diverse user base brings a broad range of requirements that need to work happily together and GridPP are one of the more challenging users. Read more...
Mon 12 Jul 2010
The Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) project closed on 30 April 2010. The project brought together a computing infrastructure, software tools and services to support more than 10,000 scientific researchers across more than 170 research communities. During the two year term GridPP played a key role in EGEE's success, being the biggest national contributor of computing resources. Read more...
Mon 14 Jun 2010
The GridPP/Imperial College developed Real Time Monitor has undergone another overhaul and is now available in different versions, supporting a greater number platforms, is more stable and has a new website. Read more...
Mon 17 May 2010
What is 45 days old, has visited 22 countries and already has close to 500 children but will outlive them all? Dave the ATLAS dataset. Born on the 30th March 2010 to his proud parents, the ATLAS detector and the LHC, Dave weighed in at just over 3 Terabytes. Very soon after that he was sent to RAL and the team there have been tracking his progress through the grid world ever since. Read more...
Tue 4 May 2010
The start of May, in some parts of Europe, marks the start of Summer. It is no different in the grid world with the European Grid Initiative (EGI) officially starting on the 1st of May. However EGEE wasn't going to end that easily and the collaboration's final meeting, the User Forum in Sweden, was certainly eventful. Read more...
Thu 15 Apr 2010
Back in 2006 the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) funded a proposal to study how GridPP works. This project, PEGASUS, ran for almost four years and has just handed in its final reports to EPSRC. What has it been up to in that time? We caught up with Will Venters who is the lead researcher on the project at the London School of Economics to ask him a few questions about the project. Read more...
Thu 8 Apr 2010
While the LHC reaches for the highest energy collisions ever generated by humans, other scientists are looking in other directions. At the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE), a collaboration of particle physicists and accelerator physicists, is building a key element of a new type of physics experiment, a neutrino factory, and they are using the Grid to understand it. Read more...
Thu 1 Apr 2010
Last year the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory got its new purpose built, state of the art, computing centre, R89. On Wednesday just after the news of the first 7TeV LHC collisions the team at RAL had an event to mark the opening of the computing centre and encourage new users to make use of the facilities at RAL. Read more...
Tue 30 Mar 2010
At midday today the Large Hadron Collider accelerated and collided protons at 7TeV. These are the highest energy collisions achieved at any accelerator and herald a new age of physics research. The LHC, which has been in development for 20 years, will explore the nature of the universe mere moments after the big bang. In the UK, the vast amounts of data coming from the LHC's detectors will be analysed using e-infrasructure provided by the GridPP project, which has spent most of the last decade preparing for the impending data deluge. CERN Director General Rolf Heuer said: "It’s a great day to be a particle physicist. A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends." Read more...
Wed 24 Mar 2010
At the end of last month the University of Glasgow held an industry day to investigate how researchers, the university and entrepreneurs can work together and facilitate access to the staff and facilities at the institute. Due to the success of ScotGrid, and the university's involvement in that, one of the themes on the day was grid computing. This meant that members of ScotGrid were on hand to demonstrate the benefits of the technology to academia and beyond. Read more...
Tue 2 Mar 2010
Last week GridPP's management submitted their proposal for GridPP4. With the current phase of GridPP coming to an end in 2011 this latest plan lays out the roadmap for the project from April 2011 to March 2014. Read more...
Thu 11 Feb 2010
At the end of last year the UK's eScience programme was put through the wringer with every project funded under the scheme since 2001 evaluated and questioned by an independent panel of international experts. Yesterday they released their judgement: The programme is by all accounts and measures "World leading" and "Empowering". Read more...
Mon 8 Feb 2010
UK researchers working in the area of photonics have being given a boost today with the announcement that Vancouver-based Lumerical Solutions, Inc. have donated ten FDTD Solutions Engine licenses to ScotGrid. Scientists will be able to perform large-scale design of devices across a diverse range of applications in biophotonics, display technologies, solar energy, optical communications, sensing and imaging on one of the biggest grid computing facilities in the country. ScotGrid provides users with 1,900 processing cores, making their work quicker and more efficient. Each donated Engine license allows researchers in the UK using FDTD Solutions to run, at no additional cost, their simulations on the high performance computing facility. Read more...
Wed 27 Jan 2010
One of the underpinning technologies of the grid are the digital certificates which authenticate users. This creates a single sign on for users and can make grid life a whole lot easier once in place. However it is this last piece which is important, "once in place". For some users the use of digital certificates is new and not necessarily very clear. However, certificates themselves are not difficult: it is the tools that we use to manage them that need to become easier, optimised to help users with the things they have to do. The team at NGS are working on this problem, developing a tool called Certificate Management Wizard or Cert Wizard. Read more...
Wed 9 Dec 2009
Last night the LHC possibly broke another world record, colliding particles at 2.36TeV Read more...
Wed 2 Dec 2009
Throwing sub atomic particles from one side of Japan to the other in to a cavern filled with 50,000 tons of pure water seems a little bit science fiction but that is the plan for the T2K experiment in Japan. An international collaboration the project has many UK members they start taking data in January 2010 and will be using the grid to transfer and analyse their datasets. Read more...
Mon 30 Nov 2009
CERN's Large Hadron Collider today became the world's highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning. Even before this however the physicists had already begun studying the data coming from the LHC. Read more...
Wed 25 Nov 2009
The first collisions have been seen in the LHC a mere three days after the restart of the world's largest machine. These events have now been sent around the world via the grid and are being processed in computing centres across the globe including the UK. Read more...
Sun 22 Nov 2009
Congratulations to all at CERN on the successful restart of the LHC on Friday 20 November. Particle beams are once again circulating! This news comes after the machine was handed over for operation on Wednesday morning. A clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o'clock on Friday evening. This is an important milestone on the road towards first physics at the LHC, expected in 2010. Read more...
Tue 6 Oct 2009
Stuart Purdie of The University of Glasgow (and GridPP) came runner up in the poster session at this year's EGEE conference. His work updates the popular qsub command for a grid-enabled world making it easier for users to migrate from local batch systems to global grid resources. Read more...
Tue 29 Sep 2009
The Enabling Grids for EsciencE (EGEE) annual conference was held last week in Barcelona, the heart of Catalonia. GridPP was well represented with many members giving talks, tutorials and running sessions while the organisation shared a booth with the other members of the UK and Ireland Federation. Read more...
Thu 17 Sep 2009
Last week GridPP had it's biannual collaboration meeting at one of the UK's oldest universities while also running an event at one of the country's newest. Read more...
Tue 8 Sep 2009
Over the summer the UK has been preparing for the imminent switch on of
the LHC. Of course the grid is no longer for the sole use of crunching
numbers for the LHC and new, and existing communities, have concerns
about security and grid usage in general. So while the sites have been
working on the ground to keep the grid running as smoothly as possible
the Joint Security Policy Group (JSPG) have rewritten and released 5
documents to make the policies governing use as clear as possible. Read more...
Tue 11 Aug 2009
The NGS and GridPP have taken another step closer to fully integrating the services they offer to the scientific community. This news means that NGS users will soon be able to add GridPP resources to the list of computing available to them. Read more...
Wed 8 Jul 2009
The computing grid that will provide the massive amounts of computer power needed to support the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC ) – the world’s most powerful particle accelerator - has passed a new series of stringent tests that mimicked the immense load it will be under when the LHC restarts later this year. Read more...
Tue 2 Jun 2009
LHC restart is scheduled for later this year. With collisions will come massive amounts of data and also lots of new users. What effect will this have on the grid, can it cope? Starting today the LHC experiments are testing this with STEP09. Read more...
Thu 28 May 2009
Today the Institute of Physics launches "Particle Physics - It Matters". The document is a look ahead at particle physics research in the UK and the impact it could have, and has had, on industry and society as a whole. Of course, no discussion of the impact particle physics has had outside the lab would be complete without talking about the World Wide Web and its direct descendant, the grid. Read more...
Tue 26 May 2009
Grid not only means distributed computing resources but also distributed manpower. Managing something like the Tier2 where people and computers are in multiple locations can be a real juggling act especially when it comes to keeping people up to date and informed. For ScotGrid communication became an even bigger issue when Graeme Stewart, their Technical Co-ordinator, moved to CERN on a long term attachment. However they have found an answer. Read more...
Tue 19 May 2009
EGEE continually monitors all its sites and thus measures their availability and reliability. Each month they release a report showing how the sites and regions performed. April marks the end of the first 12 months of GridPP3 and the restart of the LHC 6 months away the most recent figures show the UK and Ireland patiently waiting for the deluge. Read more...
Tue 14 Apr 2009
After the conference in Catania in March, GridPP has been on the move again with meetings and conferences in Prague, London and Oxford. Read more...
Wed 11 Mar 2009
Last week was the 4th Enabling Grids for EsciencE (EGEE) User Forum was held in Catania, Sicily and GridPP was there. Read more...
Mon 23 Feb 2009
This month the UK and Ireland passed two major milestones. One was the contribution of over 100,000,000 computing hours to the worldwide Grid by the sites around the UK and Ireland. The other was all 23 sites within the federation being up and fully available with almost 19,000 CPUs accessible across the region to international researchers. Read more...
Fri 20 Feb 2009
A distributed physics analysis tutorial for members of the ATLAS experiment was held at the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh on 29th and 30th January. Read more...
Wed 4 Feb 2009
The GridTalk project has launched its latest GridBriefing "Grids and clouds: the new computing". It is designed as a primer to help explain the similarities, differences and uses of the two technologies. Read more...
Fri 19 Dec 2008
Google released it's reading of the online zeitgeist for 2008 this month and the Large Hadron Collider beat out president-elect Barrack Obama (well in the UK at least). Well what about GridPP? What were the top 11 highlights/events for the collaboration? And why 11? We like to go one step beyond. Read more...
Wed 17 Dec 2008
GridPP has always been happy to support more than just the work being
done for the LHC and is particularly interested in knowledge transfer,
working with small and medium enterprises to help prototype their work
on the Grid. One of the most recent examples of one of these
partnerships was with Econophyisca and their final review has just been
submitted. Read more...
Fri 12 Dec 2008
The UK's contribution to computing for the LHC reached an important milestone last month when disk storage dedicated to the ATLAS experiment at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) broke the petabyte barrier. Read more...
Thu 4 Dec 2008
For the last two years "Steve's Tests" have helped the Grid community in the UK by providing diagnostic information which can help the systems administrators debug their site. Having just been moved to a dedicated server at Queen Mary, University of London the suite of tests now run, without intervention, monitoring the UK Grid 365x24x7. Just before the move was finished Steve also added a new network test to measure a user's view of the bandwidth between various sites and within a site. Read more...
Fri 7 Nov 2008
Four years in the development but the UK Grid is well on the way to the move from Resource Brokers (RBs) to Workload Management Servers (WMSs). Last week the RB at Imperial College London was turned off and replaced with a WMS. This was the second of the RBs supported by GridPP to be decommissioned and the final two at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory are planned to be taken out of service at the end of the month. Read more...
Thu 30 Oct 2008
In Oxford last week the UK's leading Grid projects GridPP and the National Grid Service (NGS) met to discuss how to make the idea of a national Grid a reality. The meeting was designed to bring the two communities together to introduce the underlying technologies of each as well as the opportunities that are presented by a country-wide infrastructure. Read more...
Tue 7 Oct 2008
Three weeks after the Large Hadron Collider's successful launch it was time for the LHC's computing Grid to be officially launched and unlike other popular festivals there was no chance of rain or mud at GridFest. Read more...
Thu 2 Oct 2008
Last week EGEE brought its fifth annual conference to the city where Europe and Asia meet, Istanbul. In a city which has known many names and is influenced by many cultures it was the perfect atmosphere for the collaboration to take stock of the previous 12 months and plan the next 12. Read more...
Mon 15 Sep 2008
It is mid September which can mean only one thing the collaboration is in overdrive with meetings, festivals and conferences. In the last fortnight GridPP has been all over the UK; Swansea, Liverpool, Edinburgh and London with no less than 6 different events and a major EGEE conference less than a week away in Istanbul. Read more...
Wed 10 Sep 2008
Today was the culmination of decades of work when the LHC was finally switched as the entire world watched. Read more...
Tue 19 Aug 2008
Almost a year ago the LHC@home service officially moved to the UK. In that time the service has been quietly helping to configure the LHC's super magnets and even with LHC turn on imminent it isn't quite finished yet. With over 40,000 work hungry users the LHC@home team would like to get more applications running on the servers. Read more...
Wed 13 Aug 2008
CERN has announced that the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC) will be made on 10 September. This news came as the cool down phase of commissioning
CERN’s new particle accelerator reached a successful conclusion. GridPP will provide the UK
computing needed for the petabytes of data that the LHC's detectors will produce.
Read more...
Mon 14 Jul 2008
The first week of July saw the LHC and Grid being presented at the Royal Society science summer exhibition by the UK's Science Technology Facilities Council (STFC). This annual event selects the best research being done by UK scientists both at home and abroad and gives the public a chance to meet and talk to the researchers themselves who are behind the work on show. Read more...
Wed 2 Jul 2008
When computer components fail they don't care if it's day, night or the weekend but the people running them do. Imagine a quiet Saturday at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in leafy Oxfordshire, the home to one of GridPP's largest single computing resource. The bank holiday weekend has just started no one is expected back on-site till Tuesday morning and the Tier1 has just ground to a halt, seemingly silently, or has it? The staff at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory are preparing for the worst. With LHC turn on looming computing staff at RAL are on-call and have been equipped with technology to ensure no server crashes without someone to hear the crunch. Read more...
Fri 27 Jun 2008
The Royal Academy of Engineering today held its annual Soiree and Exhibition at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. During the day the exhibition was open to STFC staff and visitors, while in the evening it was attended by the Royal Academy of Engineering fellows and their guests, including HRH The Duke of Kent.
Read more...
Wed 4 Jun 2008
Jens Jensen from GridPP is one of ten bloggers providing a sneak-peek
behind the scenes of the 23rd Open Grid Forum, held this week in
Barcelona, Spain. They are part of a grid podcast, or GridCast, that
allows readers to virtually share in the forum, as if they were really
there on-site. Read more...
Thu 29 May 2008
The heart of Westminster, just around the corner from Big Ben, was the plush setting for the most recent Grids and Industry day last Wednesday. Featuring talks from across academia and the business community the meeting, organised by The Kite Club and STFC, attracted over a hundred attendees from many areas of research and industry. Also the week before GridPP had gotten a big boost from one of the biggest players in the computer industry when the Real Time Monitor was highlighted at a recent Sun conference. Read more...
Mon 12 May 2008
It's early 2008 and most of the GridPP community is awaiting the switch on of the LHC. However working quietly in the background are, not only, other physicists but other disciplines. Part of the collaboration is working with Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) and cell biologists to develop a Grid to help the cell biology community share images and data.. Read more...
Fri 9 May 2008
A new EU project dedicated to telling the world about grid computing launched last week, with GridPP's dissemination team playing a key role. GridTalk (http://www.gridtalk-project.eu) will create a unified approach to European grid communications, working with national and international projects including GridPP and EGEE.
Read more...
Thu 24 Apr 2008
GridPP has finally entered its third phase and has been funded until at least March 2011. To mark this changeover, the project's website has had a visual overhaul which is hoped will keep the site easy to navigate but also cut down on clutter. Read more...
Tue 22 Apr 2008
Mention Grids to anyone in the community, or beyond, and their main concern is over the security of the system and the information on it. GridPP has been working on this issue since the beginning and is well aware of the problems. With this in mind for twelve weeks between January and March this year the UK and Ireland's security and storage system was tested. There were some great results, Oxford only took eight minutes to flag a ticket on the system and RAL returning full results within two hours proving that GridPP is almost ready for the LHC. Read more...
Tue 15 Apr 2008
Recently the Sunday Times printed an article titled "Coming soon: superfast internet" (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece) written by Jonathan Leake, the paper's Science Editor. The piece talks about Grid computing, but introduces a few inaccuracies - in particular by confusing the Grid with the fibre optic network underlying it. The news story spread, with misleading "Grid replaces Internet" stories appearing in The Scotsman, The Telegraph and The Mirror to name just three. Read more...
Sun 13 Apr 2008
Earlier this year, the LHC experiments took part in the first Common Computing Readiness Challenge (CCRC '08), intended to test the whole computing infrastructure in preparation for LHC turn-on. Here, we talk to representatives from each of the three main experiments in the UK, to find out what went well, what went wrong, and what happens next. Our panel members are Raja Nandakumar from RAL, who works on LHCb; Stuart Wakefield from Imperial College who is part of the CMS experiment; and Graeme Stewart from Glasgow University, who works for ATLAS. Read more...
Wed 19 Mar 2008
After the wilds of northern England and the beauty of the Lake District it was time for GridPP to reconvene once again and this time actually mark the end of the second phase of the project. With the end of GridPP2 mere weeks away, where better to examine the project's success and future than on foreign shores. It had been almost 4 years since a collaboration meeting had taken place away from British soil and with the close relationship with Grid Ireland, Trinity College Dublin kindly agreed to play host. Read more...
Tue 19 Feb 2008
2008 is barely two months old but already Enabling Grids for EsciencE (EGEE) has been busy. The All Activities meeting in January was a chance for an overview of the project's status as well as its future, while the User Forum in February brought together users and providers to discuss the issues encountered in the last year by the numerous applications and those working on the infrastructure. Read more...
Wed 30 Jan 2008
GridPP researchers from Glasgow have announced the first release of a new tool to help
physicists search the vast amounts of data expected from the ATLAS experiment. ELSSI, the
Event-Level Selection Service Interface, is a user-friendly and intuitive way of building and
running queries through the database of ATLAS events.
Read more...
Fri 21 Dec 2007
(for all those wondering how the Chair of the Tier-2 Board will deliver the kit for GridPP3) Read more...
Mon 17 Dec 2007
Two islands of Grid storage technology have now been joined, with a
successful demonstration bridging the key technologies of the Storage
Resource Broker (SRB) and Storage Resource Manager (SRM). The
demonstration was run at Supercomputing 2007 in Reno, Nevada, on behalf
of a GridPP-led team from Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Read more...
Tue 4 Dec 2007
Last week the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory introduced future computer scientists to the future of computer science. The event, Grids 4 Kids, brought in children from one of the local primary schools to learn about the Grid, visit the computing centre, take part in activities to teach them about computers and learn about the necessity of internet security. Read more...
Fri 23 Nov 2007
Last week, the National eScience Centre (NeSC) in Edinburgh played
host to over 60 grid storage experts who were in Scotland to learn about deployment of
storage services. GridPP, in collaboration with NeSC and the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider
Computing Grid, held the workshop to coordinate deployment of the next generation of the
Storage Resource Manager (SRM) interface, which will enable users and scientific experiments
to make use of advanced functionality in storage systems. Read more...
Fri 9 Nov 2007
31 system administrators from UK sites gathered at Imperial College last week to learn about
and discuss monitoring systems, in the latest of the UK HEPSYSMAN series of meetings. Read more...
Wed 24 Oct 2007
Keen eyed watchers of the GridPP website will have noticed links to two new resources on the
front page. The first of these is GridMap (http://gridmap.cern.ch), developed in partnership
between CERN Openlab and EDS. GridMap shows information on the sites in each EGEE region,
indicating both the size of resources at a site and its status. The second link is to a new
GridPP status page (http://hepwww.ph.qmul.ac.uk/~lloyd/gridpp/ukgrid.html), developed by
Steve Lloyd at QMUL, that shows in detail on one page what's up and what's down at each site.
As well as a summary table of GStat information for each of GridPP's sites, it gives Site
Availability Monitoring (SAM) test results and data specific to experiments. Read more...
Tue 23 Oct 2007
Earlier this month the annual EGEE conference was held in Budapest, Hungary. It was a chance for the entire EGEE collaboration to meet, discuss and learn about the changes in all areas of their Grid in the last twelve months. It was also the best opportunity for new or potential partners to get a more in depth understanding of EGEE, its tools and how it works. With GridPP currently accounting for more than 20% of EGEE's CPU resources it was inevitable we would have a presence. Read more...
Fri 12 Oct 2007
GridPP members at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) are gearing themselves up for an influx of help, as they take over a successful volunteer computing project. Forty thousand people have already run the LHC@home program on their home or office computers, to help prepare for the Large Hadron Collider. This week, researchers at QMUL officially launched the new base for LHC@home, which has moved from CERN. Read more...
Tue 9 Oct 2007
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) has been looking to the future, with the submission to the European Commission of their proposal for the third phase of the project, planned to start in April 2008. EGEE-II built Europe's largest production Grid, running around 100,000 computing jobs every day for scientists worldwide. With 94 partners in twelve regional federations, EGEE-III aims to expand this infrastructure and prepare for a long-term European Grid. The UK will continue to play a major role in the project, as one of the largest contributors to EGEE. Read more...
Mon 1 Oct 2007
Imperial College's GridPP site blazed a trail in August, when it became the first GridPP site to join the UK National Grid Service as an affiliate member. Read more...
Fri 28 Sep 2007
As summer drew to a close the members of GridPP returned and recovered from GridPP19 and CHEP, but for some it was time for even more travelling. The collaboration took stands to two of the UK's finest cities at the same time, York and Nottingham. Read more...
Wed 26 Sep 2007
More than 20 GridPP members were joined by nearly 500 other high energy physicists, tens of
totem poles and several orcas earlier this month at CHEP in Victoria, Canada. The conference
brought together those working on computing for the LHC and other ongoing particle physics
experiments, and included a look at plans for the International Linear Collider.
Read more...
Mon 10 Sep 2007
Tony Doyle's talk title said it all: "That Was The Grid That Was". Initially planned as the final GridPP collaboration meeting, the project's extension for three more years made it more of a mid-term review. But the most recent GridPP collaboration meeting was still a very relaxed affair with a look back at what had been done and a look at what still needed doing in GridPP2+ and GridPP3. Just after the UK's August bank holiday, the Lake District was the obvious choice for the big farewell that wasn't.
Read more...
Tue 7 Aug 2007
Looking for images on the internet can be a frustrating business. Whether you want the perfect sunset over the sea or the London skyline by night, you're dependent on people to describe the images on their web pages. Now Imense Ltd, a high-tech Cambridge start-up, has announced new investment to help them become the 'Google' of image searching, using their revolutionary technology. To test their software, they've made an unexpected partnership with GridPP.
Read more...
Tue 24 Jul 2007
With the Large Hadron Collider starting next year, grid sites worldwide are
ramping up their equipment and service levels in preparation for the
expected flood of data. But will they be ready - and how can any problems they're having be fixed? GridPP's management board have recently completed a
round of visits to all 17 GridPP sites to determine how prepared they are
for LHC start-up.
Read more...
Fri 13 Jul 2007
If he can find time in his schedule, new Prime Minister Gordon Brown
can learn about grids with last week's launch of a parliamentary briefing
paper. The four page introduction to grids and e-science has been produced
for policy makers by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology
(POST). Read more...
Mon 2 Jul 2007
Over the last year, GridPP has been slowly but surely moving into the blog
world. The latest step has come with the amalgamation of all GridPP's blogs
onto one page, at http://planet.gridpp.ac.uk/ Links to the last three blog
entries are also now available from the GridPP home page.
Read more...
Mon 18 Jun 2007
Being a GridPP user isn't always straightforward. You might have thousands of
CPU and terabytes of disk at your fingertips, but can you get your job to
work on all of them - or any of them? Although there are many more grid
users than there used to be, getting started on a grid, and getting it to
do what you want, are still not for the faint hearted.
Read more...
Mon 4 Jun 2007
Fabric management was at the top of the agenda at RAL recently, when system managers from across the UK's particle physics groups got together. Up to 30 attendees at the HEP system manager meeting heard reports from sites, talks on topical issues and feedback from computing conferences. Read more...
Tue 15 May 2007
The Grid spans the globe, with people from various areas of expertise working together virtually. But nothing beats face to face interaction: last week two of the world's largest Grid communities met in Manchester to foster links and promote collaboration.
Read more...
Sat 5 May 2007
Queen Mary's e-Science cluster has become one of the biggest computer clusters used by GridPP. After a recent upgrade, and as LHC turn-on approaches, the cluster needed an official opening. Who better to unveil the plaque than Sir Alan Sugar, media celebrity and Chairman of Viglen Ltd, which provided 90% of the machines in the cluster. Read more...
Mon 30 Apr 2007
As GridPP gears up to deal with the turn on of the LHC, some of the collaboration have taken time out of their busy schedules to bring the Grid and the LHC into schools. Read more...
Tue 24 Apr 2007
LT2, GridPP's Tier-2 based in the London area, recently organised a very successful workshop to encourage people outside GridPP and particle physics to use the Grid for their work. Read more...
Thu 12 Apr 2007
This year's IoP High Energy Physics conference took place last week at the University of Surrey in Guildford. This time it was a divisional conference shared with Nuclear Physics, Gravitational Physics and the newly-formed Astroparticle Physics Group. As usual, GridPP took a stand with a demonstration and posters; there was also a Grid plenary talk given by Dave Britton, and many GridPP members attended the meeting.
Read more...
Thu 5 Apr 2007
The Science Museum in London has unveiled its newest exhibition and it's all about the LHC and the fascinating science behind the project. It also includes a large section on the Grid. Read more...
Wed 28 Mar 2007
Science computing in the UK has been boosted with the announcement by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) of ₤30m further funding for GridPP, the UK's largest scientific Grid. The GridPP project is building a computing Grid to analyse data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The funding announced this week will allow GridPP to continue into its third phase, running until 2011, covering the period when the LHC starts taking data. Read more...
Fri 23 Mar 2007
Last week the collaboration braved the cold (again) and, for the second collaboration meeting in a row, visited Scotland. Glasgow University's Physics Department was the venue for 2007's first collaboration meeting and GridPP's 18th. Read more...
Thu 15 Mar 2007
The GridPP Project Management Board (PMB) has started a series of Site
Readiness Reviews, which will visit all the GridPP sites in the UK by May 2007.
The purpose of these visits is to encourage a two-way dialogue at several
levels (Management, Operations, Technical and Experiment) between GridPP and
the institutes to ensure that both sides are aware of issues, obligations,
plans, costs and service levels. Read more...
Mon 12 Mar 2007
GridPP was presented to MPs and Lords in Parliament recently, as part of
a PPARC breakfast presentation on the LHC. The breakfast briefing was given
to members of the Paraliamentary and Scientific Committee, an 'All Party
Group' of Parliamentarians interested in science.
Read more...
Tue 6 Mar 2007
Graeme Stewart of ScotGrid recently returned from a two week GridPP-sponsored visit to Australia, where he presented five talks on EGEE, grid data management and the computing challenges of the LHC.
Read more...
Thu 22 Feb 2007
More then 40 GridPP members descended on CERN last month for the latest WLCG collaboration workshop. While not the first workshop dedicated to WLCG operations, it
was the largest with over 270 registered participants. GridPP's
representation included people from Tier-2s, the Tier-1, GridPP management, applications and related projects such as Pegasus.
Read more...
Tue 6 Feb 2007
The Tier-1 service at RAL recently had its CPU capacity upgraded by 50% with the addition of 64 Intel dual core "Woodcrest" servers. Within 30 minutes, all the new CPU
were busy with jobs from the Grid. The new hardware was put into service in batches of 16 starting at about 17:30 on the 10th January. All four batches were in
production by 18:00, and the service had filled with additional work opportunistically flowing onto it from the Grid.
Read more...
Fri 2 Feb 2007
The UK particle physics Grid has again played a leading role in EGEE's latest biomedical data challenge, searching for
potential drugs against malaria. Malaria kills more than one million people each year, most of them young children living
in Africa. The WISDOM project analysed an average of 80,000 possible drug compounds against malaria every hour. In total,
the challenge processed over 140 million compounds, with GridPP providing nearly half of the computing hours used.
Read more...
Thu 25 Jan 2007
Thirty one UK and Ireland members of the LHCb collaboration braved uncertain
weather to attend the third LHCb-UK Software Course, held at the National
e-Science Centre (NeSC), Edinburgh, on 7th-10th January. Like previous
years' events, the course introduced participants to the software and computing
environment of LHCb, and was supported by GridPP. The course particularly
focused on the software for physics analysis and on the tools for running
an analysis on the Grid, but applications for event simulation and
reconstruction were also covered. In contrast with Edinburgh's cancelled
Hogmanay celebrations, the
LHCb-UK Software Course was again an outstanding success. Read more...
Wed 24 Jan 2007
With more than 30 national Grids in Europe alone, making sure electronic
identities work across Grid boundaries is a complex job. This is the role of the European Policy
Management Authority for Grid Authentication, EUGridPMA, which met last week in the UK for the first time. Attended by 26
members of EUGridPMA, the meeting at the CCLRC
Coseners House in Abingdon was organised and sponsored by
CCLRC and GridPP.
Read more...
Wed 10 Jan 2007
To start 2007, we asked members of GridPP's Project Management Board about their New Year's resolutions. These are the
answers we got. It appears that not all of them should be taken seriously....
Read more...
Fri 22 Dec 2006
GridPP had reached more than 5,000 CPU - half way to the total it will need
for processing data from the Large Hadron Collider. It has also passed a 1/4 Petabyte of storage. Read more...
Thu 21 Dec 2006
A defining feature of a Grid is that its components can change from
minute to minute, as storage, processors and even whole sites join and
leave, jobs start and finish and files are written and deleted.
Resources can also vary widely, from disk to tape storage, different
operating systems and processor types. But for the Grid to work, the
status and makeup of each of these contributions needs to be known, so
that resources can be allocated to users, sites monitored and accounting
data collected. For many of the world's scientific Grids, this problem
is
solved by the Grid Laboratory Uniform Environment - or GLUE schema. Read more...
Thu 21 Dec 2006
Setting up an Australian Grid site with
help from GridPP. Marco La Rosa from the University of Melbourne visited the UK earlier this year, touring Tier 1 and Tier 2 sites at RAL, Oxford, Imperial, Glasgow and Edinburgh. He has now set up Australia's first LCG/EGEE site, running mainly ATLAS and biomedical jobs. Read more...
Thu 7 Dec 2006
Almost two dozen people met in central London this week to discuss the commercial opportunities for the gLite middleware used by GridPP. Bringing together members of the business and scientific Grid community it was a great opportunity to enable knowledge transfer and help support entrepreneurship. Read more...
Tue 5 Dec 2006
Dave Newbold is a lecturer in the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Bristol. He was Chair of the GridPP User Board for the year until September. Here, Dave looks back at the high and lows of
his time as Chair, how things have changed and what remains to be done.
Read more...
Wed 29 Nov 2006
GridPP made its annual trip to Supercomputing earlier this month. This year's conference was held in Tampa, Florida, where
Dave Colling, Gidon Moont and Roger Jones presented the Real Time Monitor on the UK e-Science stand. Below, they tell us
about why they went, whether they were asked any good questions and why GridPP had the best give-aways. Read more...
Tue 28 Nov 2006
The universe is a big place, and studying it is a big challenge. To help create universal access to observations from around the globe PPARC funds GridPP's sister project, Astrogrid. Formed at the same time as GridPP, AstroGrid is now a leading member of the international astronomy community. Read more...
Fri 17 Nov 2006
Weekly online newsletter Science Grid This Week (SGTW) has been reorganised and relaunched this week at SuperComputing '06 as International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW). GridPP features in the inaugural issue with our Grid Acronym Soup (GAS) as Link Of The Week. Read more...
Thu 16 Nov 2006
Visitors to Supercomputing 2006 in Tampa, Florida this week have been the first to see a new interactive map that shows
nine of the world's largest computing Grids. The map, developed by Gidon Moont from GridPP and Laurence Field from EGEE
(Enabling Grids for E-sciencE), uses Google Earth to pinpoint Grid sites on six continents, showing more than 300 sites
overall. Like the medieval 'mappa mundi', which showed what was known of the world at the time, this is one of the first
attempts to show the whole scientific Grid world.
Read more...
Sun 12 Nov 2006
As winter eventually reached the UK, GridPP17, GridPP's third and final collaboration meeting of 2006, was held recently in the National eScience Centre in Edinburgh. Read more...
Fri 10 Nov 2006
The eight proposers of a Scottish Grid Service met in Glasgow this week to discuss the way forward with funding
organisations. The collaboration aims to let all researchers requiring computing resources connect into a large-scale
distributed system at each of the partner sites: Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow (lead),
Heriot-Watt, St. Andrews, Stirling and Strathclyde. The meeting also saw the official opening of Glasgow's new computing
cluster.
Read more...
Thu 2 Nov 2006
JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork) has begun the roll out of its newest incarnation known as SuperJanet5 (SJ5). GridPP is built on JANET - these improvements in our underlying infrastructure will be vital once we start to deal with the petabytes of data from the LHC. Read more...
Wed 1 Nov 2006
Less then two weeks after ClusterVision's final delivery of hardware at Glasgow, the new computing
cluster has been certified as a production quality Grid site.
Read more...
Fri 27 Oct 2006
The EGEE Grid this week reached 200 sites, spread across nearly 50 countries. According to the
gstat monitoring tool (http://goc.grid.sinica.edu.tw/gstat/), 201 sites are now certified on the
production Grid - 21 of which are in the UK. Overall, EGEE currently has around 30,000 CPUs at its
certified sites.
Read more...
Tue 17 Oct 2006
A monitoring system which uses GridPP resources is being used to help improve the Grid. It also impressed judges at the EGEE'06 conference in Geneva and went away with a €500 prize for best application of Grid technology. Read more...
Mon 9 Oct 2006
Enabling Grids for EsciencE (EGEE) met in Geneva recently for the project's third annual conference. GridPP was in attendance with delegates, speakers and a stand in the exhibition space. Read more...
Fri 6 Oct 2006
EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE) has announced a major milestone, with its Grid handling over a
million jobs each month for the last six months. UK sites played a key role, running
around a fifth of all the jobs this year. As well as particle physicists, scientists submitting
jobs range from biochemists simulating drugs for malaria to geophysicists analysing oil and gas
fields.
Read more...
Fri 29 Sep 2006
The Real Time Monitor has been given a makeover, with a 3D upgrade developed by GridPP's Gidon
Moont, based at Imperial College London. The new monitor was launched at last week's All Hands
Meeting in Nottingham, and this week at EGEE'06 in Geneva. It is now available for download from
http://gridportal.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/rtm/
Read more...
Mon 25 Sep 2006
GridPP returned to Nottingham last week, for the fifth annual UK e-Science Programme All Hands
Meeting (AHM). As in previous years GridPP shared the PPARC stand with its sister project
AstroGrid and again debuted a new look Real Time Monitor.
Read more...
Thu 7 Sep 2006
This summer GridPP funded, with CERN, students taking part in the Openlab Summer Student scheme. We have been able to get them to tell us about their work and experiences living in CERN for the summer. Read more...
Wed 30 Aug 2006
New work from Glasgow has shed light on the efficiency of the Grid for physics analysis,
highlighting the progress made and work still to be done before the LHC switches on. Stuart
Paterson, a PhD student, looked at the experience of LHCb physicists submitting jobs to the Grid,
both before and during LHCb's latest data challenge (DC06). Job completion efficiencies of 95%
for analysis jobs have been measured from two different studies using statistics accumulated
before DC06 commenced. However, examining the performance over a six month period, including the
recent DC06 activity when production work and analysis jobs are running together, the picture
became more complex and the efficiency could drop to around 70%. Read more...
Fri 25 Aug 2006
PPARC have announced dates for considering the GridPP3 bid. The first
discussion of the bid by the Projects Peer Review Panel (PPRP) will be on 6
September. This will include an hour's open session from 10am, with a
presentation on GridPP3 and Q&A, followed by a closed session in the
afternoon.
Read more...
Mon 14 Aug 2006
In the last 91 days CMS has successfully moved 3.3 petabytes of data around the world as part of ongoing tests of the Grid. The majority of the work was tied into the Service Challenge 4 disk-to-disk transfers, with CMS's test of the Tier-0/Tier-1 disk-to-disk rates accounting for the rest. Read more...
Fri 11 Aug 2006
The UK has come out top in the listing of CPU hours contributed to EGEEII since the project's
start. In the four months to the end of July, the UKI region contributed more than 5 million
normalised CPU hours. Tony Doyle, GridPP project leader, commented, "This is an excellent
milestone for the UK, showing how much effort has gone into establishing and maintaining the
GridPP grid. Of the UKI hours, more than a third each went to ATLAS and LHCb, demonstrating how
the UK particle physics Grid is being used extensively to prepare for the LHC". Read more...
Tue 1 Aug 2006
As of the end of July, all 21 certified UK EGEE sites have now installed gLite3.0. 14 sites have also completed the incremental upgrade to gLite 3.0.1. In EGEE overall, 105 sites are reported as at gLite3.0.
Read more...
Fri 28 Jul 2006
On July 26th CERN hosted an OpenLab workshop on Grid and Entrepreneurship. Lectures and case studies on the day gave an overview of what is involved in spinning-off technology in general and specifically in the context of computing Grids. Read more...
Fri 14 Jul 2006
Yesterday GridPP submitted its proposal for a UK Grid for LHC Exploitation, supporting
all particle physics research. Submitted in response to PPARC's call of April, the
GridPP3 proposal is for £35.2m over 3 and a half years. The full proposal, consisting of
a main document and 10 appendices, is at http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/docs/gridpp3. It will be
assessed by PPARC's Project Peer-Review Panel, starting in September. Read more...