ISGC2011 - we've crossed the savannah very well, next up: mountains

The opening begun with a sombre reminder of how important some of the scientific disciplines using distributed computing are. However, it was interesting to note a post on the LCG-ROLLOUT mailing list hours after the recent Japanese earthquake noting how despite everything, TOKYO-LCG2 was still online (and still is!). JP-HIROSHIMA-WLCG had a short network outage, and is now back to normal. However, KEK, who I work with quite closely in Belle II, was closer to the disaster and is unfortunately still without some essential services. Thankfully, all of my colleagues and their families are ok.

Afterward, a tone of grant achievement was set for the event. Steven Newhouse, on behalf of OGF, noted some of the many specifications created and the review process - it's good to know they value community feedback highly. EGI, our friendly sustainable offspring of EGEE is almost one, and WLCG is continually demonstrating its ability to reliable support fast-turnaround science.

However, the community is certainly not resting on its laurels. The infrastructure is sometimes as much of a research project as the publish-or-perish-driven groups it supports. This was well demonstrated by Peter Kacsuk who highlighted the exciting EDGI project - ensuring extension into and interoperability with desktop grid federations. This was also pointed at by Steven Newhouse's 'mountains to climb' slide, and the following references to OCCI - a cloud standards body.

Let's see how we go...