National
e-Science
Centre
Uk Condor Week
e-Science Institute 11th – 15th October 2004
This was a very successful week of activities focused on developing best practice and future
plans for the use of the Condor system. The Monday was devoted to an introduction and handson tutorials for Condor users. Tuesday was similar, with the focus on systems administration
issues. The professionalism of the Condor team in preparing and presenting the material was
matched by enthusiasm and commitment by the participants to make these days valuable both
for knowledge development and community building. A feature that worked well was interleaved
experience talks from UK practitioners.
We had 77 participants and only 22 machines set up for hands-on work. The combined efforts of
our support teams and the tolerance and good humour of the participants (many of whom had
brought lap tops) enabled the "gallon to fit in the pint pot". We must thank everyone involved -we
were certainly "sailing close to the wind", but the interest in Condor was so strong that, even with
these numbers we had turned people away.
The final three days were an intensive effort to plan international collaboration in developing
Condor, related systems, applications experience and, perhaps most importantly, a body of
shared experience on how to establish and deploy Condor in our institutions and organisations.
The mix of applications driven researchers, computing experts, Condor aficionados and systems
administrators needed no catalysis. Everyone became engaged in the enthusiasm, intensive
discussions and hard work of distilling ideas and generating documents. There is now a team of
writers developing a report which will summarise the experiences and plans for future work
together. The report will be available in December 2004 on the NeSC and NIEeS web sites.
The 50 participants who remained until Friday departed, determined to sustain the effort,
enthusiasm and sense of direction, and to work together on many topics, which will appear in the
report. NeSC and NIEeS look forward to supporting them - this we are sure will include a forum,
mail lists, further training events and workshops. The report will contain our initial plans.
The event was sponsored by The Condor team, NIEeS, EGEE and NeSC. The organisers thank
them and particularly Miron Livny, Tod Tannenbaum and Zachary Miller for their significant
contribution.
Malcolm Atkinson