GridPP News

Three particle physics experiments have started using the Ganga front end. The application, partly developed by GridPP, is proving very useful to the physics community. Read more…

After a great week at the European Grid Infrastructure’s Technical Forum in Prague, GridPP returned to the UK for its latest collaboration meeting in Oxford. Read more…

The NGS has announced that it has formally changed its name to the National E-infrastructure Service (NES). Read more…

In its first year the Turing festival had already marked itself out as something special with a lot of interest from people in science, technology, arts and entrepreneurship. This year it was even bigger with an amazing number of sessions and talks on a wide range of technology driven areas. As one of the biggest e-Science projects in the UK GridPP was asked to organise the opening session to showcase CERN, the LHC and grid computing. Read more…

Later this month GridPP will be hosting a session at the Turing Festival in Edinburgh. Focussing on the achievements from CERN and the LHC, the event will include talks from physicists, computer scientists and GridPP.
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Earlier today at a seminar at CERN researchers working on the LHC announced that they have observed a particle where they would expect to find the Higgs boson. The announcement is the first step towards a true landmark in modern physics but it’s not a categorical declaration of the Higgs’ existence. However this discovery would not have been possible without the global computing grid, which GridPP is a major contributor to and one of its founding members. Read more…

Yesterday the European Grid Infrastructure released the third episode of their “Stories from the grid” series. This latest instalment focusses on research being done on the top quark at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Read more…

Last week the Computing in High Energy Physics meeting (CHEP), one of the foremost events in the GridPP calendar, was held in New York. CHEP brings together experts from across the world to discuss the technology and services supporting the global high energy physics community. Over 500 people attended the meeting and there was a large representation from GridPP giving talks and presenting posters. Read more…

The LHC has just switched on for its first run of 2012 and is running at a world record 8TeV but the UK is well prepared for the challenges this entails. In the last 12 months GridPP has been the single biggest provider of computing time in Europe with UK computers doing over 350 Million CPU hours of work. Read more…

It had been almost 10 years but GridPP eventually returned to Manchester for a collaboration meeting last week. It was a long overdue trip and the locals made everyone welcome and the meeting was marked by some great discussions and interesting presentations from across the project. Read more…

Fresh from the EGI Community Forum in Munich, GridPP attended the Institute of Physics’ annual High Energy Particle Physics group meeting in London last week. A lot of the high energy physics community are already using the GridPP infrastructure but as a joint meeting with the Astro Particle Physics group it was an opportunity to promote the resources on offer to that community. Read more…

Last night Prof. Peter Clarke from GridPP gave the 103rd annual Kelvin Lecture to a packed out lecture theatre in central London. Titled “From protons to petabytes – the science and computing challenges at the Large Hadron Collider”, the talk was warmly received by the crowd, with a lively discussion afterwards. Read more…

Once a year the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) brings together the researchers, and technical people, using the infrastructure to discuss, and share their experience. It is a great opportunity for the scientists actively using the system to have their say. The 2012 community forum is being held near Munich next week and the UK has many contributions from both GridPP and NGS. Read more…

Once again many of the UK’s particle physics groups are hosting “masterclasses” for 6th form students this year. With help from the Institute of Physics researchers working on particle physics share their knowledge and enthusiasm for their subject through a day packed with informative and stimulating activities. This year some of the classes will have members of GridPP involved. Read more…

Cutting edge science needs bleeding edge software, you want your analysis using the most up to date techniques and applications. Ensuring that a job submitted to the grid has access to the right software has been a headache for systems administrators and users from the beginning. To make this task easier GridPP has just finished installing a CERN-developed application CernVM-FS at each of its sites, but what does this mean for research in the UK and on the grid? Read more…