JRA3/JRA4 Workshop, Stockholm

We had a day and a half workshop for joint research activity 3 and 4 of the OMII-Europe project here in Stockholm (hosted by PDC/KTH). The JRA4 sessions went quite well and although we are all quite concerned with the short time we have to prepare the milestones and the deliverable for month 12 of the project, we made a good review of the current state and draw a rather acceptable and manageable outline for the remaining 11 weeks.

I presented a survey of existing approaches to Grid Benchmarking in the first session, which in spite of my being nervous and rather unprepared went acceptable (nobody shouted at me afterwards at least). The interesting conclusion after this brief review was that you can hardly design something as a Grid Benchmark that would really comply with the definition of classic Benchmarking, since we are trying to measure a moving target here! So we should come up with a new definition for Grid Benchmarking, one that would take into account all the complexities and peculiarities of the Grid Infrastructure.

Anyway I guess we have some hectic weeks ahead of JRA4, there is the month 9 all hands meeting in Bologna, Italy and there is still lots to do. I hope this won't deviate me from my course works, the semester starts tomorrow and I really should find a balance between the classic studies and more interesting and intriguing work of this project!