As I write, it is Friday afternoon in Geneva, and from my hostel room I can see Mont Blanc. It’s often cloudy around Geneva, and it’s not always clear enough to see it. This was my one opportunity for this trip.
Despite all my complaints about how hard it is to get here and how disruptive it is back home, it is still nice to be here. The experiment does seem more real when you are this much closer to it. It’s not just a few of us around the university talking about what’s going on; here there are people all around focused on where we are and what we need to do. So yes, I will be back again (probably in the spring).
I think we did manage to bring out some interesting issues during the computing meetings this week. Yesterday I chaired a session about how things are going with the use of the Tier-2 computing sites. As we try to roll out the distributed analysis model, just how is it working out for the sites, and, more importantly, for the physicists that are starting to use them more intensively? We had reports from both sites and physics groups, and (unsurprisingly) many of each cited the same problems over and over. We also learned about some things that the physics groups want and didn’t realize that we were already working on (or have already provided!); things that they want and that we’re going to have to gently say “no” to; and things they want that are legitimate use cases that require further consideration. I still need to sit down and summarize everything that got discussed, but it will help set our agenda for the upcoming weeks, and everyone agreed that we need to do this more often.
Now that the DG’s report on the 9/19 incident is out, people have been trying to interpret what it means for us. Hard to say yet; obviously it will take a lot of effort to do the magnet replacements and so forth as described in the report. We’re still going to focus on having the detector (and everything else!) ready for May, which is the soonest we could imagine the machine being ready. From talking to people here, my sense is that people are of course disappointed by the delay, but no one is in a panic. Which is good.
So, off for some dinner in France tonight, then I have a noon flight to Amsterdam and then Minneapolis and Lincoln tomorrow. By my calculation, it will be about 20 hours door to door. Yawn.
