GridPP News

Last night the LHC possibly broke another world record, colliding particles at 2.36TeV Read more…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Last week was the 4th Enabling Grids for EsciencE (EGEE) User Forum was held in Catania, Sicily and GridPP was there. Read more…

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…

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…

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…