OMII-Europe project’s month 6th all-hand meeting

I have recently joined PDC at KTH as a part time programmer and started working on the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute. As a result I had a trip to Southampton, UK for the OMII-Europe project’s month 6th all-hand meeting which was held on 9th and 10th of November.

There are some 16 partners in the project from all around Europe plus US and china, funded mostly by the European Union and working on building a grid infrastructure for the three widely used grid middleware in Europe, i.e. Globus, glite and Unicore, plus CROWN which is developed and used by Chinese.

The meeting was organized in an interesting way. The first morning was comprised of very short progress reports from the different activity groups. Then the meeting was continued with parallel meetings for each activity group. KTH is mostly engaged in three Joint Research Activities (JRAs), namely Accounting, Security and Benchmarking. The later is quite an interesting topic which I personally like to work on. During the meeting the project manager, a guy from university of Southampton, was quite enthusiastic about benchmarking and he mentioned that there could be some PhDs funded through this activity (sounds quite tempting, doesn’t it?)

Anyway, it was quite a good and valuable experience. I mean if you come to think of it in terms of the scale and influence of the project and everything, you’ll see why I say it was a valuable experience. I hope the actual work would also be as fun as it sounded on the paper and during the presentations!