Last week saw the 32nd GridPP Collaboration meeting – a.k.a. GridPP32 – take place at the Atholl Palace Hotel in Pitlochry, Scotland, kindly supported by DataDirect Networks. Given the ongoing preparations for GridPP5, the theme was “Mini Review: A look at where we are and where we’re heading”. And in that respect, GridPP32 certainly did what it said on the tin.
The GripPP Collaboration at the Atholl Palace Hotel for GridPP32.
As well as status reports from the four LHC experiments, we had updates from the smaller Virtual Organisations (VOs) that use GridPP resources. Representatives from T2K (neutrinos in Japan) and NA62 (Kaons at CERN) kindly made the trip up to Scotland to tell us about how they were getting on with the grid, while the “smaller” VO talk presented updates from SNO+ (neutrinos in Canada), CERN@school (particle physics in school and in space) and EPIC (modelling the spread of bovine TB in Scotland).
We also heard updates on the Collaboration’s work on networking (including a marathon session on PerfSONAR), cloud operations, multi-core jobs, monitoring, configuration management, and efforts to make life easier for smaller VOs (one of which we have covered here). If you couldn’t make it – or want to find out more – you can find slides from all of the talks on the Indico page here. A huge thanks must go to our sponsors – DataDirect Networks – from whom we heard about the “Infinite Memory Engine“, and to Dr Scott for organising a very successful event.
The glorious natural beauty of Pitlochry meant that some people chose to stay on for a few days enjoying the vistas offered by the surrounding area. And with the “mini-review” of GridPP32 complete, it was indeed a good time to reflect on the achievements of the GridPP Collaboration for VOs large and small, and look ahead to what’s on the horizon.
The Pitlochry horizon (credit: J. Whyntie 2014).
Useful links:
- The GridPP32 Indico page (contains links to all of the presentations);
- DataDirect Networks – “The Big in Big Data”;
- Brian Davies’ post on GridPP32 on the Storage Blog;
- The Atholl Palace Hotel – our venue for GridPP32.