New Project Manager and Technical Lead for NT1
The Nordic WLCG Tier-1 (NT1) is a large-scale storage and computing effort that is a part of a wider international infrastructure for storage and computing called the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). NT1 is one of the 14 regional computing sites within WLCG and is distributed across four countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. The virtual site is developed, maintained and operated by a small and dedicated virtual team of system administrators and software developers.
In 2021, the management of the NT1 team will go through changes. Instead of having one leader, there will soon be two persons with different yet converging responsibilities and a common goal.
Vincent Garonne will start as the new NT1 Manager. Since 2017, Vincent has been working as a Senior Engineer in the Department of Research Infrastructure, University Centre for Information Technology (USIT) at the University of Oslo. He joined NeIC at the same time as scientific data management and storage expert for the NT1 activity. Before joining NeIC, Vincent took several key roles in the largest international collaborations in the history of science (CERN-LHC). As the ATLAS Distributed Data Management coordinator, he was responsible for more than 120 computing centres on five continents to archive, simulate, process and serve petabytes of data. He was the CERN project leader of the Rucio project which manages ATLAS data and has been a huge success, both for LHC experiments and other data intensive sciences.
“This is a great honour for me. We have big challenges ahead of us, preparing for the High Luminosity upgrade of the LHC and the greatly increased volumes of data with severe constraints set both on hardware and human resources. NT1 should be robust and efficient to maintain its major role within the various international collaborations and the LHC computing activities allowing the optimal physics throughput. I believe in the critical necessity to develop NT1 as a multi-purpose e-infrastructure supporting scientific computing beyond high-energy physics communities. The crucial experience and expertise of all communities facing extreme data and processing challenges are mutually beneficial for the necessary scaling up of NT1. I will endeavour to do my very best with great passion, dedication and personal commitment to support everyone in the NT1 and NeiC community.”
Mattias Wadenstein will continue working in the NT1 activity in a new role. Having been the NT1 Manager for so many years, his experience and knowledge related to the NT1 operations are unique. In 2021, he will take on the position of NT1’s Technical Lead. Mattias started his career as an HPC systems administrator at HPC2N, Umeå University, in 2001. He worked in several European and Nordic grid computing projects in the 00s, before starting work with NeIC in 2012. His work at NeIC has been split between NT1 activity management and technical leadership of the NT1 operations.
“I look forward to working with Vincent Garonne as a tightly coupled leadership team in this new phase of NT1. I will enjoy being able to focus on the technical development of NT1 operations and help shape the future of large-scale storage for scientific data. In particular the upgrades of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will bring many challenges over the next years.”
Both Mattias and Vincent will start in their new roles in January 2021. The NeIC Director Gudmund Høst is looking forward to see, how the NT1 team will face the coming challenges:
“I am happy that we have found a way to strengthen management capacity and prepare for future LHC challenges through dedicated roles for strategic and technical leadership. Vincent and Mattias have excellent backgrounds for filling these roles.”