In early September the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project was demonstrated to Grid researchers from other disciplines at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting held in Nottingham. Members of GridPP, the UK's contribution to the LCG, showed conference delegates a map that monitors jobs moving around the Grid in real time. The monitor is a Java applet that represents the jobs' location and status using coloured blocks, and gives options to identify the virtual organization the jobs are from and the output of different resource brokers.
"It can be difficult for people who have never seen a Grid working to imagine what it does," said Dave Colling from Imperial College, London, whose team built the map. "Our map is an easy way to show the Grid visually and to demonstrate the scale of the LCG. It's also useful for experts, who can see at a glance how well the Grid is working."
Apart from several talks on UK aspects of LCG development, Bob Jones from CERN gave a well-received plenary lecture on the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science in Europe) project. GridPP were also pleased to win an award at the conference for best UK e-Science project website. Steve Lloyd, the GridPP collaboration chair, said: "We had a really successful conference. Grid scientists in the UK now have a much better idea of what the LCG has achieved so far and where it's going. Scientists from other disciplines were also very interested in the EGEE project and we hope that many of them will get involved."
• The monitor applet can be accessed at www.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/e-science/projects/ demo/index.html.
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Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicle Crémel