Benvinguts a Barcelona. ¿Parles Grid?*
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.
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GridPP, NGS, GridIreland, NeSC and OMII UK shared space and costs on the UKI stand. A cosy fit with only 4 square metres to play with but it was the prefect showcase for the federation with the booth being very busy during the breaks in sessions. It was also the venue for the first public demonstration for the new beta Real Time Monitor. The team at Imperial have rewritten the code behind this very well known tool to improve stability and extendibility, expect to see this go from strength to strength in the next few months. |
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The GridPP participants were not only there to be in the audience but many were there to give talks, convene session and organise tutorials. These covered almost every area covered by EGEE (and EGI). David Kelsey, Mingchao Ma and Linda Cornwall were all involved with various security sessions during the week. Linda even finished off the week chairing a tutorial on Vulnerability Assessment and Secure coding for middleware on the Friday morning. Standards are getting more and more important especially in the area of data published for monitoring services and Stephen Burke discussed GLUE 2.0 within the Future of Grid Information Systems session. |
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The two hot topics at the conference from the GridPP perspective were the imminent LHC switch on and the transition to EGI. Jeremy Coles presented the UK perspective on the hammer cloud tests being run by ATLAS experiment (with help from Chris Walker of Queen Mary, University of London). John Gordon GridPP's deputy project leader is the UK's rep on the operations task force for EGI and presented the operational objectives of EGI at the conference.
The UK is also involved in the less technical, but no less important, area of outreach. The collaboration's dissemination officer organised two sessions for EGEE members to help them work with new media and the press. Working with the GridTalk team the first was a showcase of the tools available online and the usefulness of video. The second featured Helen Thomson, a journalist from New Scientist, talking about science and the press. Helen is not new to the world of grids and has worked with GridPP before maybe once or twice so was the perfect candidate.
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The posters and demo sessions every year are the meetings best showcase for new exciting research from young researchers working on and with EGEE. This year the UK had a great selection of work on the posters with 4 different projects being presented. These included CPU Usage Accounting, the EGEE Operations Portal, the GOCDB for EGI and an integration of qsub with the grid to create gqsub. This final piece of work created a lot of interest even before the conference began which culminated in it being runner up in the poster competition, being pipped to the post only by the LifeWatch project. |
This was the last annual conference for EGEE but there is still the User Forum to come in Uppsala, Sweden and the UK will be there in force again.
You can see the full programme of sessions and tutorials from EGEE09 at the conference's Indico page:
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceTimeTable.py?confId=55893&showDate=all&showSession=all&detailLevel=session&viewMode=parallel
Stuart's poster on gqsub can be found here:
http://indico.cern.ch/materialDisplay.py?contribId=162&sessionId=137&materialId=poster&confId=55893
There are various pictures from the conference available on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=egee09&m=tags
The GridTalk team covered the conference through their popular Gridcast blog:
http://gridtalk-project.blogspot.com/search/label/EGEE%2709
*Welcome to Barcelona. Do you speak Grid?
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