And EGEE’09 started: some impressions from the welcome plenary

Hola! I arrived yesterday late night to Barcelona, so I had no time yet to experience the city, restaurants, the fun! I’ll start sharing with you my impressions of the plenary sessions I am attending this morning.
I was impressed by the large audience already at this very first day; it is a great opportunity to discuss with all our EGEE colleagues and with the many representatives from other projects that are attending this week! The wireless connection is also good and fast, perfect for blogging.
Coming back to the plenary, two highlights related to grid operations:
Bob Jones, the EGEE director, showed in his slides some interesting infrastructure snapshots, taken from the Gstat 2.0 prototype. Gstat 2.0 is an update to Gstat, one of the oldest operational tools in the EGEE Grid. It provides view of the Grid information system, the BDII, letting you see all the resources on the grid. It uses modern Web 2.0 techniques and technologies (Javascript, AJAX, Open Mapping, Django) to give a high-quality experience to the user.
It is a tool for site administrators, checking the validity of the information published, providing intuitive history views and a web-based LDAP browser to help debug problems:
<http://gstat-prod.cern.ch/gstat/site/pic/>.
It also is a useful tool for Infrastructure managers at the EGEE ROCs, showing the provided resources in their region:
<http://gstat-prod.cern.ch/gstat/summary/grid/egee_roc/>.
The developers of Gstat 2.0, based at ASGC and CERN, are always waiting for your feedback and feature requests at <is-grid-support@cern.ch>.

Gonzalo MERINO from PIC gave an excellent overview of LHC and the heavy usage of the EGEE infrastructure by the four HEP VOs. He also stressed the importance of the grid Service Availability Monitoring (SAM) framework for providing valuable monitoring data. He commented that "SAM ensures peer pressure" for driving up the reliability of grid sites. This was an excellent introduction for the SAM/Nagios talks later in the day, in the track "An Introduction to Regional Operational Tools", don’t miss them!