Hi,
This is Dick Greenwood with an embarrassingly late ASP2014 blog entry.
It was my great pleasure to participate in ASP2014 in the “Grid Computing” part of the school. Grid computing was added as a component of the ASP in Ghana two years ago and we are glad to see that it has become a valuable addition to the school program. As in 2012, my institution, Louisiana Tech University,joined with other DOSAR institutions UT-Arlington (UTA), the University of Oklahoma (OU), the University of Kansas (KU), and the Open Science Grid (OSG), to put together exercises for ASP2014. From those institutions, Jae Yu (UTA), Julia Gray (KU),Horst Severini (OU) and Rob Quick and Kyle Gross of the OSG, in collaboration with our Dakar hosts, deserve a lot of credit and thanks for planning the logistics of the 2014 grid program.
Jae kicked the program off with a rousing and entertaining introductory talk that described the necessity of the grid to meet the challenging computing demands of present day experimentation at the LHC.
Next, overview talks about high throughput computing were given by Rob, followed by great hands-on tutorials by Rob, Kyle and Horst.
Then, I had my turn. I gave a lecture/tutorial that applied an actual HEP analysis of Z boson decays. This talk/tutorial had been originally developed by Pat Skubic and Chris Walker of OU. I added to it actual data taken with the ATLAS detector that had been very kindly sent to me by Heather Gray.
With this data, we (the students and I) actually were able to produce the Z mass peak with ROOT. That was so great!! During this tutorial, Jae walked around the room and made sure that each student actually did find the Z mass…fantastic!!
Well, that was the high point of ASP2014 for me. But I must say that I really enjoyed meeting and socializing with many of the students, and many of the lecturers as well.
The entire trip was a wonderful experience for me. Thanks everybody!
Best wishes,
Dick
