Welcome to WLCG London

Having spent some amusing times being dragged kicking and screaming into pubs by Neasan wherever WLCG business takes us, I was clearly deemed fit to tell the world about the goings on at the WLCG workshop in London.

My interest is in storage management. Ideally, it should just work; I am a physicist and the computing is a tool to allow us to "do physics". However, with a global computing system of this scale and complexity, there will always be issues. The situation now is much better than if I were writing this post a couple of years ago - the software is maturing, the community expertise is greater than ever, and we have the sharp focus of real LHC data to keep us on our toes.

However, there is still much room for improvement. The experiments (well, the one I work on, CMS, at least) continue to find new and novel ways to abuse the computing systems, and we have to respond to those. New scales of workloads show up new problems. Systems that weren't deemed critical suddenly become the weakest link. Users complain when their data isn't on tape in 5 seconds flat. This list goes on, and the tools need to be responsive.

I'm hoping this workshop will be a look back and a look forward. We've come on a long way and everyone here should be proud of that. However, we have a long way to go - the scary volumes of LHC data are yet to come.