A Brief History Of GridPP
This a timeline of events and milestones in GridPP's history. There are photos and facts which detail GridPP's growth and progression. If you can add anything to an event/milestone, correct something or suggest an item to add, please email Neasan O'Neill @ n.oneill@qmul.ac.uk
Conferences:
GridPP has attended many conferences since it started for a full list of these meetings and their details please see the meetings page.
1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010
1999
- Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman published, which gives Grid computing greater visibility.
2000
February 2000
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A Joint Infrastructure Fund bid is submitted for £6.2m to fund a prototype Tier-1 centre at RAL, for the EU-funded DataGrid project. At the same time PPARC asked the 2000 Spending Review for money to fund the UK Grid. The JIF bid is eventually withdrawn, due to overlap with the SR2000 bid.
-
The institutions involved in the JIF bid were:
- University of Birmingham
- University of Bristol
- Brunel University
- University of Cambridge
- University of Edinburgh
- University of Glasgow
- Imperial College London
- Lancaster University
- University of Liverpool
- University of Manchester
- Oxford University
- Queen Mary, University of London
- Royal Holloway, University of London
- Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
- University of Sheffield
- University College London
- At the time of the JIF bid the LHC was expected to produce 4PB of data a year for 10 years. By 2005, the expected figures had risen to 15PB a year for 15 years.
- RAL was chosen as the location of the Tier-1 centre because it already hosted the UK BaBar computing centre and had a long history of delivering large scale computing and data storage to UK particle physics.
Between February and October 2000
- The withdrawn JIF bid for a Tier-1 centre and Tier-2s is used in the formal request for money from Spending Review 2000.
October 2000
- PPARC signs up to the EU DataGrid project, promising 20 people and a Tier-1 centre.
November 2000
- Trade and Industry Secretary Stephen Byers announces £98m for e-Science with Spending Review 2000. This includes £26m for PPARC to develop HEP and astronomy Grid Projects. The HEP project becomes GridPP and the astronomy project becomes our sister project, AstroGrid.
December 2000
- GridPP plan created at a meeting at RAL. Initially the £26m was to help fund UK posts to coordinate the UK arm of LCG, as part of that organisation. It was decided to move towards a UK organisation because LHC Computing was not being sufficiently funded at CERN, to promote UK visibility, give the UK a much closer relationship with CERN IT, and to provide large number of well trained UK people.
2001
January 2001
- European DataGrid project officially starts
April 2001
- A Shadow Project Management Board, refered to as "DataGrid-UK", is established to manage DataGrid until the GridPP plan is approved. Its aim is "to efficiently allocate 9 posts within GridPP which will directly contribute to the UK contribution to the EU DataGrid project"
- GridPP first proposal submitted. It is a 100 page document, that requests £25.9M for a three year co-development programme with CERN and the EU DataGrid project, funding up to 67 FTE. It includes the Tiered structure, of Tier-0 at CERN, Tier-1 at RAL and four Tier-2 groupings. The proposed WorkGroups are:
- Workload Management
- Information Services and Data Management
- Monitoring Services
- Fabric Management and Mass Storage
- Security Development
- Network Development
- Prototype Grid
- Software Support
- Experimental Objectives
- Dissemination
- CERN
May 2001
- 1st GridPP collaboration meeting at Cosener's House, Oxfordshire, There are 19 institutions involved:
- The University of Birmingham
- The University of Bristol
- Brunel University
- CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research
- The University of Cambridge
- Central Laboratory of the Research Councils
- The University of Durham
- The University of Edinburgh
- The University of Glasgow
- Imperial College London
- Lancaster University
- The University of Liverpool
- The University of Manchester
- Oxford University
- Queen Mary, University of London
- Royal Holloway, University of London
- The University of Sheffield
- The University of Sussex
- University of Wales Swansea
- University College London
- PPARC's e-Science Committee meets to consider the proposal and approves the GridPP project, allocating £17m.
June 2001
- A PPARC Computing and Networking Advisory Panel report envisgaes that GridPP will have a total of 44 posts. There would be 14 allocated to fufill PPARC's commitment to the EU DataGrid, 15 posts for testbed activities and the final 15 would be based in CERN as the UK contribution to the CERN LHC Computing Project.
September 2001
- GridPP officially starts, with funding for 3 years
November 2001
- Second GridPP collaboration meeting at Edinburgh
- Debut of first GridPP logo
2002
January 2002
- DataGrid releases first production version of the testbed middleware.
February 2002
- Third GridPP collaboration meeting in Cambridge
- First international file transfers using X.509 digital certificates
1st March 2002
- RAL involved in a test of DataGrid by creating a small 5 site testbed Grid, with CERN, IN2P3-Lyon, CNAF-Bologna and NIKHEF
- LHC Computing Grid Project launched.
-
First Prototype Tier1/A Hardware delivered to RAL, consisting of 156 dual CPU PCs with 30GB of storage each.
April 2002
May 2002
- Fourth GridPP collaboration meeting in Manchester
- Debut of the first GridPP branded posters
- A user at Imperial College makes the first significant use of the UK particle physics Grid submitting over a hundred jobs to 16 Grid nodes at Imperial and 8 Grid nodes at RAL running EDG middleware
June 2002
- ScotGrid, one of the four Tier-2s in GridPP, goes into production
August 2002
- GridPP makes its first visit to the All Hands e-Science meeting
September 2002
- Fifth GridPP collaboration meeting at Imperial College London
- A prototype GridPP Portal that allows users to submit jobs to the Grid through a web interface is demonstrated
December 2002
- PPARC receive a further £31.6m for their e-Science programme
- The UK plays significant role in LHCb Data Challenge
2003
January 2003
- Sixth GridPP collaboration meeting at Cosener's House, Oxfordshire
February 2003
- PPARC put out call for proposals for the second phase of its e-Science program. GridPP starts work on their proposal for the second phase of the project, GridPP2, to start in Sept 2004
April 2003
-
Results of the LHCb Data challenge of 40 Million simulated events announced.
June 2003
- Proposal for GridPP2 submitted
July 2003
- Seventh GridPP collaboration meeting in Oxford
- LHC Computing Grid middleware is deployed at RAL
August 2003
- UKHEP Certificate Authority is replaced by the UK e-Science Certificate Authority. This issues the digital certificates needed to use the Grid.
September 2003
- Eighth GridPP collaboration meeting in Bristol
- LHC Computing Grid is launched
December 2003
- The Grid 2: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman published, an update to the original book.
- GridSite, initially a tool used by the GridPP website gets its first production release
- GridPP2 proposal accepted by PPARC ensuring project will run till Sept 2007 with £16.9m
2004
February 2004
- Ninth GridPP collaboration meeting at NeSC in Edinburgh
April 2004
- EU DataGrid project ends and is replaced by EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe)
- The first EGEE conference is held in Cork, Ireland
- GridPP gains one new member, the University of Warwick
June 2004
- Tenth GridPP collaboration meeting at CERN
- New GridPP logo for use in GridPP2 announced
September 2004
- GridPP2 is launched
- Eleventh GridPP collaboration meeting in Liverpool
- GridPP website wins award at All Hands Meeting for Best e-Science Project Website
- CHEP 2004 in Interlaken, Switzerland
October 2004
November 2004
- Supercomputing '04 is held in Pittsburgh
2005
January 2005
- BaBar UK demonstrates the first successful integration of the Grid into the official BaBar Monte Carlo production system
February 2005
- Twelfth GridPP collaboration meeting at Brunel University
March 2005
May 2005
- GridPP has grown to 2,740 CPUs and 67 TB of storage
July 2005
- Thirteenth GridPP collaboration meeting in Durham
- GridPP members use the UKLight high speed connection between Lancaster and RAL for the first time, moving data 50 times faster than a normal ASDL line.
September 2005
- Fourteenth GridPP collaboration meeting in Birmingham
- First WISDOM biomedical data challenge for drug discovery is run to look for drugs against Malaria
- GridSiteWiKi software released which allows users with the correct digital certificate to edit wiki pages.
- New version of Real Time Monitor Launched at e-Science All Hands Meeting.
October 2005
- International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF) established to regulate the digital certificates used on the Grid worldwide.
November 2005
- GridPP's storage capacity reaches 100TB
- 2,000,000 jobs were run on the EGEE Grid in 2005
- Supercomputing '05 is held in Seattle
December 2005
- A 12 hour webcast to celebrate Einstein Year (World Year of Physics) takes place with a half hour discussion on Grids.
2006
January 2006
- Fifteenth GridPP collaboration meeting at RAL
- LCG reaches data speeds of 1GB/s during testing of the infrastructure
February 2006
- CHEP '06 held in Mumbai, India.
March 2006
- The PEGASUS project is announced, a social science study of GridPP by researchers from the London School of Economics
- PPARC signs the LCG Memorandum of Understanding with CERN, which commits the UK Tier-1 at RAL and the four UK Tier-2s to provide services and resources to the LCG
April 2006
- EGEE enters it's 2nd phase
- PPARC looks for proposals for the continuation of the UK's Grid computing for Particle Physicists after September 2007
May 2006
- Second WISDOM biomedical data challenge for drug discovery is run to look for drugs against avian flu
June 2006
- Sixteenth GridPP collaboration meeting at Queen Mary University of London
- Undergraduates run LHCb jobs on the Grid
July 2006
- Proposal for GridPP2+ submitted; this would move GridPP2's current end date of September 2007 to April 2008 which will put GridPP's funding in line with the financial year
- Proposal for GridPP3 submitted; this would extend the project beyond April 2008 to April 2011
August 2006
- GridPP has 3,240 CPUs and 246.25TB
- gLite 3 installed on all 21 GridPP sites
- The UK comes out top in the listing of CPU hours contributed to EGEE II since the project's start earlier in the year
September 2006
October 2006
- EGEE hits 1,000,00 jobs a month on the Grid for the past 6 months. The UK processed 1/5 of these jobs.
- The EGEE Grid reaches 200 sites, spread across nearly 50 countries
November 2006
- Seventeenth GridPP collaboration meeting at the National eScience Centre in Edinburgh
- Upgrade of the academic network JANET begins
- PPARC annnounces extension of funding for GridPP2 till the end of March 2008
- Google Earth implementation of the Real Time Monitor is made public at Super Computing '07 in Tampa Florida
December 2006
- GridPP accounts for 27% of the 2006 total EGEE CPU resources
- GridPP has 5,000 CPUs and more than 250TB of storage.
2007
February 2007
- Third WISDOM biomedical data challenge for drug discovery is run to look for drugs against malaria
- Rutherford Appleton Laboratory upgrades it's CPU capacity by 50% to 1256 job slots
March 2007
- Eighteenth GridPP collaboration meeting at Glasgow University
- PPARC annnounces ₤30m for GridPP extension till the end of March 2011
- The GridPP Project Management Board (PMB) starta a series of Site Readiness Reviews, which will visit all the GridPP sites in the UK by May 2007
April 2007
- Big Bang Exhibition opens in the Science Museum in London. It has a section on Grids/GridPP and members of the collaboration contributed to the content
May 2007
- Sir Alan Sugar officially opens Queen Mary's cluster.
- Open Grid Forum 20 and the 2nd EGEE User Forum both happen in Manchester at the Manchester Central conference central.
June 2007
- GridPP embraces blogging and launches planet.gridpp.ac.uk which aggregates all of the collaboration's blogs into one easy to find place.
July 2007
- A four page parliamentary briefing paper on grids and e-science is produced for policy makers by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology
- GridPP's management board complete a round of visits to all 17 GridPP sites to determine how prepared they are for LHC start-up.
August 2007
- GridPP partners up with Imense Ltd, a high-tech Cambridge start-up, working on ontological image searching using Grid technology.
September 2007
- Nineteenth GridPP collaboration meeting in Ambleside
- The EGI Design Study begins. It aims to create a blueprint for the future European Grid Initiative
- The Computing in High Energy Physics (CHEP) conference is in Victoria, Canada.
- GridPP has a busy week with stands at both the BA Festival of Science and the UK eScience All Hands meeting in York and Nottingham.
October 2007
- Imperial College becomes the first GridPP site on the National Grid Service.
- Enabling Grids for EsciencE(EGEE) bids for money from the EU to fund a third phase<
- LHC@home, a BOINC powered project moves to the UK.
- EGEE '08 conference is held in Budapest, Hungary.
December 2007
- The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory plays host to a Grids4Kids event with children from a local school.
- The UK's two major Grid infrastructures get another step closer to full interoperability when key technologies underlining them (Storage Resource Manager and Storage Resource Broker) are demonstrated to work together.
2008
January 2008
- ELSSI, the Event-Level Selection Service Interface, a user-friendly and intuitive way of building and running queries through the database of ATLAS events has its first release.
February 2008
- EGEE User Forum conference is held in Clermont Ferrand, France.
March 2008
- Twentieth GridPP collaboration meeting in Dublin
April 2008
- GridPP begins its third phase.
May 2008
- STFC holds its largest Grid and Industry workshop in westminster.
- GridPP's Real Time Monitor is featured during a talk at the JavaOne conference.
- GridTalk a Grid communications project begins.
June 2008
- Resource Broker (RB) at Glasgow switched off in favour of the Workload Management System (WMS)
July 2008
- The Grid (and LHC) are exhibited at the Royal Society summer exhibition in London.
August 2008
- LHC switch on is officially announced as September 10th
September 2008
- 21st GridPP collaboration meeting, GridPP21.
- LHC is turned on.
- GridPP, as a part of STFC, attend the annual UK eScience All Hands meeting in Edinburgh.
- GridPP organise two events at the BA Festival of Science.
October 2008
- GridPP attend, as a member of the UK and Ireland federation, the annual EGEE conference in Istanbul.
- An event officially launching the worldwide LHC Computing Grid, GridFest, is held at CERN.
- Discussions between NGS and GridPP begin on moving towards a single national UK Grid.
- Resource Broker (RB) at Imperial College London switched off in favour of the Workload Management System (WMS)
November 2008
- Grid storage at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory breaks the 1PB barrier.
December 2008
- The EGI Design Study release their blueprint for the European Grid Initiative
- The last 2 GridPP Resource Brokers (RB) at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory are switched off in favour of the Workload Management System (WMS)
2009
February 2009
- UK and Ireland federation passes the milestone of having contributed more than 100,000,000 hours of CPU time to the Grid(since February 2004)
March 2009
- The location for the new European Grid Initiative (EGI) headquarters, NIKHEF in Amsterdam, is announced.
- The 4th EGEE user forum is held. Co-located with OGF25 and the the 2nd OGF Europe International event in Catania, Sicily.
- GridGuide, part of the GridTalk project, is officially launched featuring information on the people and places which make up over 26 Grid sites across the globe.
April 2009
- 22nd GridPP collaboration meeting, GridPP22.
May 2009
- The UK and Ireland is the 3rd most reliable/available region within the EGEE collaboration with an availability of 94% and reliability of 96%.
- The Institute of Physics launches "Particle Physics - It Matters". It includes a section on the grid.
- By now the UK and Ireland has contributed 11,346,200 hours (almost 1,300 years) of CPU time to the Biomed team using the EGEE infrastructure, a third of the group's total usage.
June 2009
- STEP'09 (Scale Testing for the Experiment Program) runs from the 2nd to the 14th of June. The final analysis of this testing period is very positive for the UK.
September 2009
- 23rd GridPP collaboration meeting, GridPP23.
- GridPP is present at the annual EGEE conference, on the UKI stand and with many talks and posters from members of the collaboration. Stuart Purdie's work on gqsub wins second prize in the poster competition.
November 2009
- LHC is switched back on after a year out of commission. Five days later the collisions begin.
- LHC circulates a beam of particles at 1.18 TeV around the machine. This is the highest beam energy ever achieved by man.
- GridPP attends Supercomputing'09 on the EGEE stand.
December 2009
- LHC breaks record for highest energy collisions, 2.36Tev.
- GridPP has a joint stand with NGS at the UK eSCience All Hands Meeting and IEEE eScience meeting in Oxford.
- An international review of UK eScience is taking place. The review is looking at all the project's funded under the UK's eScience programme since 2001 and judging their success or otherwise.
January 2010
- The results of the international review of UK eScience are launched GridPP is selected to have a stand at the event showcasing the programme's successes.
February 2010
- After months of work alongside ScotGrid Lumerical systems announce that their package FDTD Solutions Engine can be used on the grid.
- EGI.eu is formally founded. Neil Geddes is the signatory for the UK.
- First beam of 2010 circulated in the LHC.
- GridPP4 proposal submitted to STFC.
March 2010
- Beams circulated in the LHC at 7TeV.
- The new computing centre at RAL officially opened.
April 2010
- 24th GridPP collaboration meeting, GridPP24.
- The 5th and final EGEE User Forum is held in Stockholm, Sweden. With many stranded in Sweden due to volcanic ash.
- The Pegasus project ends.
May 2010
- The European Grid Initiative begins.
Last modified Thu 5 August 2010 . View page history
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