On 30 November 2009 Institute of Physics Belgrade hosted a visit from Dr.
Markus Nordberg, Resources Coordinator of the LHC
ATLAS experiment at
CERN,
where his responsibilities include budget planning and resources allocation
for ATLAS activities. During his stay at the Institute, Dr. Nordberg visited
SCL where Dr. Aleksandar Belic and Dr. Aleksandar Bogojevic welcomed the guest
on behalf of the laboratory and shortly presented our members, ongoing and
future research and development projects, as well as SCL's high performance
computing infrastructure. The support provided by SCL's two Grid sites to
ATLAS VO was also discussed during the visit.
After his visit to SCL, Dr. Nordberg gave an inspiring talk at
IPB Colloquium
on benefits of member-countries from their participation in research
activities at CERN. Apart from the benefits for high-energy community in each
country, other research groups from the broader field of physical sciences and
engineering can actively participate in the work done at CERN, where many
cutting-edge technologies are being developed for the purpose of
LHC
accelerator. In addition to this, industries from all member-countries could
greatly benefit from contracts for the commercial work at CERN, as well as
from the technology transfer, while developing technological solutions
according to the specifications provided by CERN researchers and engineers.
Dr. Nordberg also pointed out that participation in CERN activities not only
brings benefits to experimental groups and industry, but also boost the
development of computing capabilities of each country. CERN is now one of
leading players in European Grid computing initiatives, and has successfully
led many National Grid Initiatives towards collaborative framework
EGI
(European Grid Initiative), which will ensure operation of Europe-wide
distributed computing and data storage infrastructure, offering support to all
researchers requiring significant computing resources.
At the end of his presentation, Dr. Nordberg and IPB's director Prof. Dr.
Dragan Popovic gave overviews of current Serbian participation in CERN
activities. Dr. Nordberg stressed that Serbian contributions to ATLAS and
CMS
experiments are highly visible. He also praised Serbian contribution to CERN's
Grid computing activities, with the prominent amount of CPU time provided to
ATLAS and CMS numerical simulations. In addition to the support in terms of
computing and data storage resources, Dr. Nordberg emphasized important
contribution of SCL to the development of the EU-recognized high-energy
physics e-learning tool
HYPATIA, developed within the
Learning with ATLAS at
CERN project.