A computing banquet

Delayed post from Thursday....
So another day, another 100 talks, followed by another 100 food courses.

Just to provoke a suitable tirade from Sam, I will describe that morning's SSD plenary as an "informative and thorough summary on the unquestionable advantages of SSDs" (not really). More interesting was a talk from David South on long term data preservation for experiments. A very worthwhile idea I think, and I hope it can be supported.
In parallel talks, there was an update on Hammercloud developments - now available for LHCb, CMS as well ATLAS and apparanty in the future other VOs will be able to "plugin". Also coming in the future are more advanced/configurable statistics.
Andreas Peters outlined the cern "disk pool project" EOS, and, as mentioned by Sam, the obvious questions followed from Brian B and others, "why yet another filsystem/ storage manager? Are dCache. HDFS etc.etc. etc not worth adapting..." But to look at the positive side (as they are certainly going to carry on with this anyway) if something good develops then it maybe something worth T1s or T2s trying out.
In the same session there was another tool presented that we might use, a flexible benchmark that allows you to trace any application and then "play it back": copying the disk calls.Potentially very useful for testing out new kit - and, though it hasn't yet been packaged for general consumption, we'll defiantely be following up with the developer for a preview.

Friday was the stream leaders summaries, which you don't need since you have had ours ;-).
Overall I've been very impressed both with the organisation of the conference and of the quality of the talks...

And, as my temple visits should have placated the travel gods to guide me home through typhoons, strikes and whatever else is out there; we should be back to provide a more digested summary in next wednesdays storage meeting.