GridPP's Top 11 of 2008
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.
Number 11 – ATLAS breaking the petabyte barrier at RAL
Like an early Christmas present for the ATLAS experiment, in November the disk storage at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory dedicated to ATLAS passed the petabyte mark.
Number 10 – The death of the Resource Broker
December 1st saw the shut down of the UK's final Resource Broker (RB) to be replaced by the Workload Management System (WMS). This move marks an important stage in the maturity of the UK Grid as it move to a more stable and interoperable infrastructure.
Number 9 – GridPP 3 Begins
Arguably one of the most important events this year, GridPP began its 3rd phase on April 1st, to mark this the GridPP website was given a facelift. This third round of funding means that the collaboration will be working on the Grid until at least early 2011 and who knows what that will bring.
Number 8 - Collaboration meetings
2008 saw the entire collaboration get together only twice, Dublin in March and Swansea in September. This didn't dampen spirits at either, even with the rain trying its best, and they were great for the community to meet and discuss, argue and contribute to all areas of Grid development.
Number 7 - Working with other communities
During 2008 GridPP worked with cell biologists, industry and stock market analysts. These projects help the Grid expand its user base but also help the technology mature and make it easier to bring new work onto the Grid.
Number 6 – A UK wide Grid?
In October GridPP started talks with the National Grid Service about bringing the two closer together on all levels and to begin the process of creating a National Grid Infrastructure to fit in with the European model.
Number 5 – GridPP's RTM highlighted at Java conference
The Real Time Monitor is one of the most used tools created by GridPP, Visible at every event the Grid is mentioned at from small one day meetings to the world famous Royal Society Summer Exhibition. In May however the monitor got ones of its biggest showings at the JavaOne conference in California where it was shown as one of the Java applications used at CERN.
Number 4 - Coverage in The Times X2
April saw a massive spike in interest in the Grid especially within the media (online and in print). This was the result of an article in The Times by Jonathan Leake. With articles from publications all over the globe taking the story and running with it the extra press coverage was great. It was such a shame that the article was factually incorrect and that the mistakes were repeated in another article by the same paper over 5 months later.
Number 3 – Official Launch of the wLCG
In October less than a month after the LHC switch on the worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (wLCG) was inaugurated at a day long event at CERN.
Number 2 – The successful challenges
There were two major tests of the GridPP infrastructure this year. In the first quarter of the year Mingchao Ma at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory put GridPP's sites' ability to monitor, log and respond to requests about individual jobs being run at them over long periods of time. This Security Service Challenge was great for GridPP with lots of individual successes but also many lessons learned. Around about the same time was the Common Computing Readiness Challenge which was testing the Grid's ability to deal with the LHC's data deluge. This was another success for the UK and preparations are being made for the next CCRC.
Number 1 – Switch on of the LHC
Predictably at number 1 is the switch on of the Large Hadron Collider. After over 20 years of planning this September protons were successfully circulated in the world's largest machine amid massive public and scientific interest. Over a billion people tuned into the launch event making this arguably the biggest single event this year. GridPP has been preparing for this for over 7 years now and 2009 will mark the start of the data deluge from this historic experiment and the Grid is ready for it.In case you missed it The top ten fastest rising terms in the UK according to Google were:
- iplayer
- iphone
- youtube
- yahoo mail
- large hadron collider
- obama
- friv
- cam4
- jogos
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