GridPP News

It has been over 40 years since it was first suggested but today after less than 4 years of running, the LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS were able to announce that they have evidence for the Higgs Boson, but not enough to announce its discovery. They hope to be able to make the full announcement within a year, but none of this work would be possible without the computing resources provided by GridPP and its international partners. Read more…

They say tall oaks from little acorns grow and on Sunday the 9th of December 2001 the seeds of today’s grid were sown. On that day four sites across Europe connected their resources to form the very first grid testbed. Over the next decade this proto-grid would ultimately grow to become the global infrastructure of over 400 sites that we know today. Even at this early stage the UK played a major role with two of those pioneering sites being from GridPP. Read more…

This week the LHCb experiment passed a significant milestone by processing one inverse femtobarn of data in 2011, and the UK played a major part in this, crunching almost 20% of the total. Read more…

In high energy physics bigger is usually better. Now a team at CERN has decided to look at different instead of big. The Compact LInear Collider (CLIC) team are investigating the potential of a new kind of particle accelerator and to help them they are simulating their designs using grid resources, with GridPP being a major contributor. Read more…

September is the month universities prepare for the return of their students, it is always a busy season for GridPP and this year was no exception with the collaboration travelling between 3 different meetings in 3 weeks; GridPP27, the EGI Technical Forum and the UK eScience All Hands Meeting. Read more…

GridPP has been very active in supporting many disciplines in the last decade. However, only in the last couple of years has it been collaborating with social science researchers. Now the National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS) project is attempting to develop e-Infrastructure to support their work and GridPP is helping them to get up and running. The work is going well and the team presented it at the UK eScience All Hands Meeting (AHM) in York today. Read more…

September 1st marked 10 years since the official start of GridPP. The collaboration has come along way in that time, with the UK now one of the leading countries both in wLCG and EGI. However it was in the first year that the foundations were built for the success that was to come. Read more…

GridPP’s sister project the NGS has announced that it has secured funding until the end of July 2012. Read more…

Last week Queen Mary, University of London hosted a workshop looking at the Lustre file system. With almost 50 attendees it was a very successful meeting, with inputs from industry and academia. Read more…

A landslide can wipe an entire village off the map leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Their effects are amplified in poorer countries by under-developed infrastructure and a lack of resources for disaster recovery. To combat this geographers based in Bristol have been working with colleagues in the Eastern Caribbean to model landslides and their after-effects, and to identify potential solutions. They are now porting the work on to the grid with support from GridPP. Read more…

Earlier in the year GridPP attended the Software Sustainability Institute’s (SSI) Collaborations Workshop in Edinburgh. The team at SSI have spent the last 2 months sifting through all the discussions and talks from the workshop to deliver what they can do to help the UK’s research community over the coming year. Read more…

Last summer EGI started providing access to their applications database. This resource makes finding the grid app you need for your work as easy as possible. Now the team, based at the Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications in Greece, working on the database have made it even easier for users and providers to access this important tool with a new web widget. Read more…

GridPP provides computing for UK particle physicists and this group extends well beyond people working on the LHC experiments. The collaboration has helped many other users get up and running on the grid including T2K, MICE and SuperB. Last week a new particle physics experiment, SNO+, made the first step on to the grid, setting up their Virtual Organisation. Read more…

Software licenses, a necessary evil in a world where intellectual property is king. A facile solution for academia might be to just let their software run free, or for big companies just lock the code down completely. Is either the best way to approach things or is there a third way? In this, the 2nd of our series of stories on licensing and grids, we look at how grid providers view the issue. Read more…

Earlier this year GridPP lost its project manager when Sarah Pearce jumped ship to become deputy chief of the Astronomy and Space Science division of CSIRO. Since then Pete Gronbech has been appointed to replace her until the end of GridPP3. But who is Mr Gronbech, and how did he end up here? Read more…

Licensing is a thorny issue in the IT world. Does it protect the intellectual property of the hard working application developer or is it a Faustian bargain which you must enter into to use a monolithic corporation’s products? Of course nothing is that black and white, and in the grid world there aren’t just shades of grey. Read more…

Dr Sarah Pearce, GridPP project manager, is leaving the collaboration at the end of January. Read more…