Grids: A Beginners Guide To...

LT2, GridPP's Tier-2 based in the London area, recently organized a very successful workshop to encourage people outside GridPP and particle physics to use the Grid for their work. Held on the 16th of April at Imperial College the meeting was open to staff and post-graduate students from the five LT2 institutes; Queen Mary, University of London, Royal Holloway, University of London, Imperial College London, Brunel and University College London. Almost 30 people registered from across the five campuses working in a variety of disciplines including meteorology, fluid mechanics, neuroscience and biomaterials. Although organized by GridPP the National Grid Service (NGS) was on hand to offer their perspective on Grids and to give an overview and the experience of using their system. It was a full day program with candid talks on various aspects of the Grid starting with an introduction and moving on to talks explaining how it is being used and by who, help on getting started and ending with a discussion of the assistance offered to help small and medium enterprise on the Grid. As all talks were kept short there was a lot of discussion and questions between them so any immediate concerns were covered at the meeting. Dave Colling of Imperial College was one of the organizers and was very pleased with how the day went and the turn out, "This was really a pilot workshop for us and are delighted with the turnout and the reaction to the talks. We hope to be welcoming some new users on to the Grid from a lot of different areas of the sciences very soon". Full details of the program, speakers and presentations given can be seen at: its Web site. If you would like to organize something similar for your site or Tier-2 please contact Neasan O'Neill (n.oneil@qmul.ac.uk) with any questions. Source: GridPP