GridKa School - the second:

Today it was the second day at GridKa School!

In the morning I was listening to different presentations. I learned about certificates, authentification and authorization, the different support structures within the EGEE project and the difference between grids and clouds.

I really enjoyed the talks, and after absorbing sometimes abstract and theoretical information I got to process my first job in the grid.

I attended a glite introduction workshop and actually got to "use" the grid.

"glite (pronounced "gee-lite") is the middleware for grid computing. Born from the collaborative efforts of more than 80 people in 12 different academic and industrial research centers as part of the EGEE Project , gLite provides a framework for building grid applications tapping into the power of distributed computing and storage resources across the Internet."

glite eases the communication with the grid, e.g. the WLCG Grid and DGrid use glite as their middleware component.
To get started within the grid one has to get a certificate as well as a membership within a VO, this was well prepared for the participants of the workshop.
So that the job could act on my username I needed to initialise a proxy.....and then I was able to submit my very first job, it was processed in Dortmund.
We did not only use the computing nodes, but also stored some files to the storage elements of the grid.
The final task was to render an animation. I really enjoyed the course: a big experience for me, since I had heard a lot about grid computing, but never actually got to use it before.

In the evening there was a poster session with participants presenting their work.

I really enjoy the event so far, although I am quite tired (and was yesterday) after a day filled with information and abbreviations!

Good night :)