This week had been full of social pre-Christmas events, meetings and presentations. The working week had ended on Friday with an annual IT Department Meeting.
There were several presentations (which surprisingly took over 90 minutes). Mainly about the goals that were planned and which had been accomplished in 2005.

My group was also mentioned - as developing the control systems for the LHC (and not only) experiment is right now very important. The assembly works on LHC are starting to accelerate and the pressure is increasing. Commissioning of several systems had already been done.

But the presentation was mainly focusing on LCG and EGEE grid projects. The LCG project goal is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC. LCG is tightly coupled with the EGEE project, as it serves as a production environment for EGEE. EGEE is being funded by the European Commission and is supposed to develop a service grid infrastructure, improve and maintain the middleware and attract new resources and users. The EU EGEE project director - Fab - had left CERN and joined Microsoft quite recently.

And after listening for over 90 minutes about the grids (it seems that they've got great marketing) and goals for the next year we had an aperitif. The snacks were really good and I somehow felt like in the old student times - and had to try each type of snack (several times...).

Links: CERN, LCG, LHC, EGEE