Started my internship at Nikhef
About two weeks ago I started my internship at Nikhef, the Dutch institute for subatomic physics. Up until now it has mostly been a dizzying experience. I'm learning to cope with a whole new world, namely that of Grid computing. That wiki page is actually not very specific as to scale, so perhaps the GridPP introduction page can convey it better. Nikhef (together with SARA) has a Tier-1 site, which means they can provide computing power and storage for one tenth of the data generated by the LHC experiments. If nothing else, this map showing the grid sites should impress you.
But you still know nothing of my tiny, (so far) insignificant role in all this. It's to design and develop the EES. It involves the redesign of existing (sudo-like) pluggable software library that should be backwards-compatible. And oh yeah, it's in C. I hope now you'll understand why I feel like my head is spinning. I've just about given up on reading all the related articles linked from the LHC wikipedia entry in my first week. I feel right in my place, but not very useful yet. The Grid infrastructure is so huge I only have a vague, high level idea of how it's all supposed to work. I have heard new acronyms every day for the past two weeks, most of which are still kind of lacking a real definition for me. In the mean time I've been coding several prototypes (more like examples, or exercises) of how parts of the project should work.
Blogging everything I learn there would be impossible, but you can follow me on twitter to keep up with my progress. My direct supervisor / boss is also on there. I hope to get out a blogpost again every week or so.
