Nordic WLCG tier-1 facility activities in the international spotlight
Activities of the Nordic WLCG Tier-1 facility continues attracting international attention, and spring this year saw a number of international events with our participation. In early May NT1 experts took part in the major international conference Computing in High Energy and Particle Physics (CHEP23) which was held in Norfolk, VA for the first time since 2019, after a long interruption caused by the pandemic. The conference attracted close to 600 participants from around the world, addressing a wide range of computing topics. NT1 presented a talk “Nordic Data Lake Success Story” on successful operations of the distributed scientific data infrastructure which is implemented with an innovative automated deployment of dCache that scales well over many sites in a distributed federation. In addition, NT1 presented a poster on integration of Galaxy and ARC middleware. Both are innovative developments that have impact outside the traditional area.
Soon after CHEP23, NT1 had a project meeting in Umeå, bringing together collaborating experts from outside Nordics. This meeting was followed by the ARC7 workshop, focussing on finalisation of the next major release of the ARC middleware that enables NT1. Participants from Switzerland, Slovenia, Netherlands and Lithuania joined Nordic experts in this truly international effort, hosted by NT1.
ARC7 release was also in the spotlight during the EGI 2023 conference in Poznan later in June: NT1 experts ran an ARC7 tutorial, which was well attended, and ARC7 was also presented at the WLCG Grid Deployment Board meeting that took place at the conference. The international community is eagerly awaiting this new release, which will rely on modern interfaces and therefore will support a wide range of scientific communities and applications, well beyond the current NT1 scope.
NT1 has been also invited to a panel on federated computing at the JENA Computing Workshop. JENA is a European cross-community workshop on the strategy of computing to discuss the challenge of scaling on a European level for large infrastructures are diverse and not coherent, e.g. how the WLCG concept can be adapted to cope with the increased demands.