Roving reporter: Voices from Monday

During the Monday coffee break, recorder in hand, your EGEE corespondent eagerly sought out conference delegates, asking them what they hoped to get from the conference this week. Here is a selection . . . look for more tomorrow!

What do you hope to get out of this week?

“There are many interesting sessions – one of my issues is that I want to attend more than one parallel sessions at once! It's the most difficult problem I have to solve right now,” said Yannick Legré of Healthgrid, with a laugh. “The other thing is that we are presenting results from several ongoing projects and we, of course, want to win the best demo award. We often do well, not every time, but I hope this year . . .”

“I'm hoping to see all of our SA3 friends, we don't get the chance to see each other so often,”said Oliver Keeble, EGEE SA3 activity manger (software integration, testing and certification). “And I hope to get the chance to understand how the project works and personally see how users are using the infrastructure, and of course celebrate a bit the last of the EGEE conferences. What do I think will come out of this week? We are all planning for the transition to EGI and everyone carries in their head a slightly different picture of how this will work and this is the perfect opportunity for us all to synchronize.”

“I hope to get a better understanding of the projects moving forward with EGI, in particular the HEP SSC's (high energy physics specialized supports centers) – that's a proposal I'm helping put together,” said Jamie Shiers, leader of the grid support group in the IT department at CERN, and the person responsible for the coordination of the worldwide LHC Computing Grid (wLCG) service. “So what we want to do is understand the overall budget that we can bid for and then we can understand much better the tasks and the partners that can fit in to that project.”

“The big theme of the whole conference is the transition to EGI and, with the two hats that I wear, this meeting is very important from both directions,” said Steven Newhouse, technical director of EGEE and interim director of EGI (catch an interview with Steven in the current International Science Grid this Week). “From an EGEE perspective we're looking to confirm our plans for the second year of the project – which involves many changes. This week activity managers will be discussing with their staff what changes will be put in place over the next six months and during the start of EGI during the early part of the summer.

“The next second thing to look for from this week is the work of the EGI council, which meeting on Thursday. One if the big issues the council has been working on in its preparations is which organizations, which NGIs, will be running the EGI global tasks for the foreseeable future. We have a provisional allocation which will be discussed and agreed at the EGI council meeting. By next week, hopefully, we'll know which NGIs are responsible for which activities.”

Did I miss you at the coffee break? Well, what do you hope to get out of this week? Comment below!