Something Old, Something New
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.
Monday saw GridPP hosting a session on Grid computing in the UK at the annual British Science Festival. This year the festival was held at the University of Surrey, bringing together scientists from around the world to discuss their research with each other and with the general public. The session was a taster of the myriad of research going on in the UK using the grid infrastructure. With researchers from Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh and London the presentations included discussion on the impact grid computing has had on the LHC, digital modelling of ancient instruments, FireGrid and reconstructing holograms.
On Tuesday however the collaboration had moved to a slightly older academic institution, Clare College in Cambridge. Founded 640 years before the University of Surrey, it was the site of GridPP23, the last collaboration meeting before LHC switch on later in the year.
Spread across 2 days (with ancillary meetings the day before and after) it was time to take stock of the position the UK was in with respect to supporting their users. Of primary concern is the LHC with data taking expected in the next six months but also speakers from smaller experiments, and even a technology transfer project, were asked to speak.
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After some "state of the union" presentations from project management, Roger Bailey gave an update on the problems with, and progress of, the LHC machine. This talk was of extreme interest especially with the LHC physicists. The rest of the day was dedicated to hearing the two sides of the LHC story; users and providers. Each of the LHC experiments presented their progress and expectations from the grid later in the year while user support and expectations on the side of the computing sites led to a wide ranging and interesting discussion session. |
Mark Slater closed the first day with a very interesting talk on the latest work being done using GridPP by a Small to Medium Enterprise(SME). Camtology is a collaboration between Imense and iLexIR with the aim of creating a database called an n-gram corpus which is used in natural language processing and computational linguistics. This tool is essential to help them in their work trying to improve text searches online by helping the search engine understand context and content of both a query and the text being looked at.
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Once the talks were over the group convened on Peterhouse, the oldest college in Cambridge with drinks on the lawn and fantastic 5 course meal in the Peterhouse dining hall built in 1290. Also at the dinner the sponsor TMC Technology raffled off a mini RAID array with Sam Skipsey walking away with it at the end of the night. |
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The second day focussed on network, hardware and deployment issues. All 4 Tier2s, the Tier1 and the networking teams all gave an update and status report on their domains with a lot of discussion on future expansion that could be needed. The final session however looked at the non-LHC users with MICE, ILC and MINOS all presenting their work and their plans to use the grid. Stepehn Burke of RAL discussed the support issues around these and the other non-LHC projects.
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With only the deployment board left to meet on the Thursday the main meeting ended on Wednesday afternoon with the hope that the next meeting at Royal Holloway in April would be the first to present data from first collisions at the LHC.
The talks from GridPP23 can be found here: |
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