A taste of new physics

Having got to the Globe of Innovation, outside CERN on a sunny winter's day, the opening talk of the 8th e-Concertation is from Sergio Bertolucci from CERN. He is introducing CERN but also giving the audience a feel of the new physics already coming from CERN's new Large Hadron Collider. It is clearly early days for this enormous machine, but it is already throwing out unexpected results for particle physicists.

Having been involved in grid computing for a number of years, it is great to hear that all the work that has been put into computing to support the LHC is beginning to pay off for the global particle physics community.

Getting back to the e-Infratructure side, I'm here in Switzerland this week for the gSLM project, which is trying to help improve the service quality on the grid by bringing experience and approaches from commercial IT service management to the grid. In this way we hope to improve the efficiency of the grid, and the impact of the investment Europe has made in the area. As a member of an SME, I'm also looking forward to this afternoon's sessions on understanding the impact of e-Infrastructure and how it can bring benefits beyond the academic community.