INDUSTRY

More then 40 GridPP members descended on CERN last month for the latest WLCG collaboration workshop. While not the first workshop dedicated to WLCG operations, it was the largest with over 270 registered participants. GridPP's representation included people from Tier-2s, the Tier-1, GridPP management, applications and related projects such as Pegasus. The workshop was originally intended to be a 3 day event but it soon became a focal point with other meetings being arranged around it - from a dCache workshop at DESY to a joint EGEE Operations Workshop on the Thursday. It also included a visit to the ATLAS experiment for those who registered in time. The agenda was packed throughout the week (Web site), kicking off with a very welcome introduction to LHC physics by Jos Engelen on the first day. Following this were talks about how the four LHC experiments are preparing for first collisions. Afternoons were generally made up of a number of parallel sessions and attendance depended on interest but covered topics such as databases, VOM(R)S, data management, GGUS and monitoring. Even the evenings were utilised with Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions. The meeting organiser Jamie Shiers worked very hard to ensure that every bit of feedback was acted upon. He commented, "Feedback from workshop attendees is very valuable as it allows the programme to be tailored to address the real concerns and questions of the various WLCG sites. GridPP was particularly proactive in this respect as well as volunteering panelists, note-takers and topics for BOF sessions." Thursday saw a very successful attempt to discuss topics openly by way of panel discussions - an idea pioneered at GridPP collaboration meetings. By the end of the week the planning only intensified with Friday devoted to BOF and experiment tutorial (not really tutorials so much as open discussion of plans and issues) sessions. Brief summaries of each can be found in the slides here at:its Web site. Jeremey Coles, GridPP's production manager, concluded that, "In general the workshop was found to be very useful not just because of the talks but because it brought together people from all parts of the Grid - users, middleware development, project leaders, standards contributors and managers. It was also a chance for people to meet in person and socialise in the evenings...." Source: GridPP