GridFest Day: Celebrating the development of the LHC grid

“After the very successful start of the Large Hadron Collider on 10 September, it is now the turn of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to celebrate the transition from a development and deployment phase into operation,” said Wolfgang von Rüden, head of CERN’s Information Technology department, in his welcome address to 250 grid enthusiasts gathered in CERN’s ‘globe’ building.

CERN’s Director General Robert Aymar echoed that comment, saying: “This is just the first step in a long voyage. The LHC is a discovery machine, and its research programme stretches out two decades into the future,” he said. “There are three needed tools to study physics. You need accelerators, detectors and computing. It is the computing that turns the flow of data into useful information.”

Feature - WLCG

Stateside at the bi-continental LHC Grid Fest

Three weeks after the first beam circulated in the Large Hadron Collider across the Atlantic, staff and supporters gathered again in Fermilab’s signature high rise. Via satellite, they celebrated the official start-up of the world-wide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) with their colleagues around the U.S. and abroad.

Feature - News from Turkey

Istanbul roundup

What has 545 people from 48 countries, 285 presentations, 97 sessions, 12 demonstrations, and 50 partners?

The EGEE conference in Istanbul.

“There was an excitement here,” said Bob Jones, EGEE project manager. “It all came together.”

Link of the week

What is the grid, anyway?

It seemed appropriate at this time to attempt to answer this commonly asked question.

In “Grid computing in five minutes,” you can read about what it is, how it works and why it matters—along with case studies of the grid in action, from nuclear fusion to earth science to natural disaster prediction, and more . . .

Images of the week

GridFest Video

So, we have all seen coverage in these pages of GridFest Day, and read about the early days of the LHC grid.

Or have we seen and read it all? See the video that was sent to the European Broadcasting Union, which contains interviews with many of those in the know—and cool animations, too.