As a natural extension of its participation in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, Pakistan has begun a deeper involvement in the LHC Computing Grid (LCG). A first step towards this was the Grid Technology Workshop held in Islamabad on 20-22 October, which was organized by Pakistan’s National Centre for Physics (NCP) in collaboration with CERN. The primary goal of the workshop was to provide hands-on experience in Grid technology to Pakistani scientists, engineers and professionals, enhancing their skills in Grid-related tools such as Grid architecture, Grid standards and the Globus toolkit.
The workshop was inaugurated by CERN’s director-general, Luciano Maiani, who explained that Grid technology will be crucial in exploiting the physics potential of the LHC, which is currently being constructed at CERN by a broad international collaboration that includes Pakistan, as well as China, India, Japan and other eastern and far eastern countries. The inauguration was attended by a number of dignitaries, including Parvez Butt, chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and ambassadors from countries such as Iran, Bangladesh, South Korea and Mynamar. In addition to the participants from Pakistan, several people from CERN attended the workshop.
A variety of talks on the first day was followed by a two-day tutorial session for the 45 participants, who came from 14 different scientific, research and development organizations and universities across Pakistan, including the NCP, the PAEC, the Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South (COMSATS), and the National University of Science and Technology. The Grid tutorials were based on a testbed consisting of nine servers, including computing elements servers, storage element servers, a resource broker server, a server for the Berkley Database Information Index and TopGIIS, a Replica Catalogue Server (RLS), and worker node and user interface servers. The host and user certificates for the Grid testbed machines were issued by the French CNRS certificate authority.
The workshop was very well publicized in the local newspapers and on television, and the participants found it both interesting and useful. The next step is to launch an LCG testbed partner site node on the same resources, and the whole exercise will lead to participation in the Data Challenge 2004 (DC04) for LHC computing.
