Università degli Studi di Siena

iCSC

Paolo Adragna is undertaking PhD studies in Experimental Physics at University of Siena. He is currently involved in the ATLAS experiment as one of the developers of the GNAM online monitoring system and, together with the people from INFN in Pisa, is participating to the commissioning phase of the Tile Hadronic Calorimeter. Before joining the ATLAS group in Pisa as a scientific associate, he already worked as a programmer for the CDF II experiment at Fermilab in Batavia and for the VIRGO experiment at LAPP in Annecy-le-Vieux.
Paolo Adragna is dottore magistrale in Physical Sciences and graduated from the University of Pisa in 2004 with a thesis on online monitoring and resolution optimisation of the ATLAS Tile Calorimeter.

CERN

iCSC

Miguel Anjo graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), with a thesis on Personal Data Storage in Context-aware Systems, within a research group at University of Oulu (Finland). He currently works at IT-ADC-DP (Databases and Applications for Physics) section as Database Administrator and testing Oracle Real Application Cluster for the future Physics Databases service.

Imperial College

iCSC

Ioannis Baltopoulos graduated last year from the University of Kent with a degree in Computer Science obtaining the Top Degree with First Class Honours. Having worked for Sun Microsystems for a year and at CERN as a member of the ATLAS Trigger Data Acquisition group he has developed a broad range of skills in the areas of web application development and web services. He is currently studying towards his Master’s degree at Imperial College in London from where he will graduate in September 2005. His research interests fall within the areas of dynamic software architectures, architectural description languages and web services which he hopes to explore through his PhD work at Cambridge.

University of Heidelberg

iCSC

Gerhard Brandt is an experimental high-energy physicist from the University of Heidelberg, where he received his diploma in physics in 2003. He is a member of the H1 collaboration and currently working on his doctoral thesis. His main research subject is the analysis of high-Pt phenomena. On the service side he is release coordinator for the
H1 physics analysis software. During his studies he obtained some practical experience in the HERA-B and ATLAS experiments.

CERN

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Giovanni Chierico graduated in Electrical Engineering at the University of Padova (Italy), with a thesis on satellite telecommunication (DVB-S).
He currently holds a staff position at CERN, in the IT-AIS-HR (Human Resources Management) section, developing and supporting J2EE and Oracle based applications. He previously worked at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (CGI/Perl/Unix), has been a consultant on .NET technologies and developed Linux based web applications.

CERN

iCSC

Brice Copy is working on the project planning tools used by CERN to supervise and monitor large projects such as the LHC construction, EGEE or the Atlas detector. He coordinates the technical effort and investigates development best practices that allow CERN to create web-based project management tools using best-of-breed open source frameworks.
Brice Copy previously worked as software engineer at the Oracle European development centre (Reading UK) where he worked on UML modeling tools and Java development frameworks.
He obtained a MSc in "Distributed Applications and Networks" from the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK) in 2000.

CERN

iCSC

Advanced Software Development Engineering Track.
Working at CERN in the Internet Services Group.
Designer and Developper of the Listbox Plattform Migration for Mailing Lists at CERN.
Most of his professional work has been oriented to the design and deployment of Artificial Intelligence Information Retrieval Software Agents. He has designed and participate in the development of commercial Web Mining applications.
Currently, he is involved in a project of Mailing List Platform Migration at CERN, this project affects to more than 45000 users and has the deployment of a Web Application for New Mailing List Management (http://cern.ch/simba) as one of the most important points for the Service. The technology used is .NET with C#, ASP.NET, Perl and Python.

CERN

iCSC

Sebastian Lopienski presently works in the CERN IT Department, providing
Central CVS Service for software projects at CERN. He used to work in the accelerator domain (CERN AB/CO), developing application for Controls in Java and Visual Basic. He graduated from the Computer Science Faculty of Warsaw University in 2002 (Master's thesis on Distributed Computing in Java). His professional interests include security of computer systems and cryptography, distributed systems and parallel programming, Java language.

CERN

iCSC

Michał Kwiatek has graduated from Warsaw University, Computer Science Department. Back in Poland, he worked as web application developer and database specialist for a major Polish mobile phone company. At CERN, he works in IT-DES group providing support to oracle users and building central deployment platform for Java web applications.

CERN

iCSC

Petr Olmer studied computer science in Prague. He is interested in logical aspects of artificial intelligence, and is writing a PhD thesis that brings together multiagent systems, text mining, and socioware. Now he works at CERN as a fellow in the IT department. He is responsible for workflow applications of the CERN Computer Centre.

CERN

iCSC

Zornitsa Zaharieva holds a Masters Degree in Industrial Engineering from the Technical University – Sofia and a Masters Degree in Computer Science, specialization Information and Communication Technologies from Sofia University ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’.

She is currently working as a fellow in the Data Management Section in the Controls Group of the Accelerators and Beams Department at CERN. Her activities include the design, implementation and support of databases and interfaces, which are related to the needs of the accelerators control systems users community.

Warsaw University, Warsaw    Poland

iCSC

Marek is a PhD student at Institute of Informatics, Warsaw University.  Currently he is involved in the "Pi of the Sky" astronomical experiment, whose goal is online monitoring of the sky, looking for optical flashes. He stayed at CERN as a technical student working with the ROOT team on improving transparency of the subsystem for parallel data analysis - PROOF. He received Master's degree in Computer Science from Warsaw University, Warsaw and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. The research for his Master's project included development of a parallel grid application for spectral data analysis (biophysics). Apart from his Computer Science studies Marek is finishing his Master's Degree in Experimental High Energy Physics. His research interests include parallel programming and distributed systems, computing for physics as well as theoretical computer science.

Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw    Poland

iCSC

I am a MSc. student at Warsaw University of Technology, Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology. I stayed at CERN from October 2004 until September 2005 as a technical student. I was a member of DES-DIS group and worked with Oracle databases backups. My thesis is related to the area of my work at CERN - I am developing an application that will support development of backup strategies for Oracle databases. Apart from Oracle I am interested in machine learning, evolutionary, heuristic and data mining algorithms.

Universty of Brunel    United Kingdom

iCSC

Liliana Teodorescu is a Lecturer at Brunel University, UK.  She holds a Ph.D. in Particle Physics from Bucharest University, Romania.  Since her graduation she worked on particle physics experiments at different laboratories around the world: Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF), USA, Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) – Pisa, Italy and Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre (SLAC), USA.  She is currently working on CMS and BaBar experiments, being particularly interested in development of new algorithms for data analysis.

Newcastle, United Kingdom

iCSC

Vijayalakshmi Sundararajan is currently a BCS-ISEB certified Test Analyst based in NewCastle, UK.  She has been actively working in the IT industry since 1999.  She worked for one of India's largest software company and gained expertise in software testing while serving clients like Morgan Stanley and Lucent Technologies. In 2005, she collaborated through Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium with the CMS computing team at CERN to develop the infrastructure for automatic software validation.

Albert-Ludwigs Universität , Freiburg    Germany

iCSC

I am currently working on my doctoral degree in physics at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg, Germany after receiving my diploma in computer science at the same University. Our group participates in the COMPASS experiment at CERN. The experiments main goal is to investigate the structure of the nucleon. There I am involved in the physics analysis and the development of intelligent tracking algorithms. My interests include statistical learning and its application in HEP.
 

University of Alberta      Canada

iCSC

I am a PhD student at University of Alberta, Canada. Working on Atlas,  the "computing part"  is on the simulation of LUCID detector and the Monte Carlo study of some physics processes. Although I’m still a newcomer to HEP, I have been playing with computers since I was 8 years old. Starting with Basic and DOS, I came across quite a few OS and several languages, and started programming with C in junior high school. Programming is one of my most favorite exercises (both mental and physical). I've get a lot of stories to share with everyone. However, the more I learn, the more I realize my weaknesses. I’m looking forward for the chance to learn from all of you.

 

Iris CHRISTADLER

Leibniz Supercomputing Centre - Germany

I am a member of the grid and the user support teams at LRZ. We operate a 9728 core SGI Altix 4700 and a heterogeneous Linux-Cluster with 800 cores. Together with the MPG a cluster with 800 cores and 350 TB disc space is part of LCG as a Tier-2 Center. In addition to LCG, LRZ is also a member of the DEISA/eDEISA grid infrastructure. My work involves porting of applications to different platforms, optimization, debugging and grid enablement, which is currently limited to DEISA but should be expanded to LCG as well.

Jose Miguel DANA PEREZ

CERN, Geneva  - Switzerland  

Jose M. Dana studied at University of Almeria (Spain) where he obtained a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science and worked for the "Computer Architecture and Electronics" department for the last two years of his degree. Moreover, he is member of the "Supercomputing: Algorithms" research group of his University since 2004. During his collaboration he has written several papers about scalable image and video coding. He was a CERN Summer Student in 2005 and he worked in compiler optimization related tasks (in CERN openlab). In October 2006 he re-joined CERN openlab as a Fellow working this time in Grid deployment and virtualization subjects. Right now, he is combining his work in CERN openlab with his PhD studies.

Alfio LAZZARO

University of Milan and INFN, Milan - Italy

I am a postdoc in University of Milan, department of Physics, and I'm a member of the BaBar Collaboration and recently a new member of Atlas Collaboration.  BaBar is an experiment of High Energy Physics running at SLAC, Menlo Park, CA. Currently I'm the Physics Software Coordinator of the Collaboration. The activity is finalized to develop and maintain the code used for event reconstruction and data analysis. My research is on physics analysis and software used for data analysis. In particular, I study the charmless decays of B mesons to final states containing an eta or eta' meson. For all these studies I have developed a fitting program (maximum likelihood fits) in C++ language on Linux/UNIX platform. This program, called MiFit, uses ROOT and RooFit classes. I use several other techniques, like Fisher Discriminant, Neural Network, Decision Tree.

Manfred MUECKE

University of Vienna - Austria

Andrzej NOWAK

CERN, Geneva  - Switzerland

Andrzej Nowak has been working at CERN openlab, a partnership between CERN and the industry (Intel, HP, Oracle), since 2007. His early research concerned operating systems security, mobile systems security, and wireless technologies. During his studies in 2005 and 2006, Andrzej worked at Intel, where he researched custom performance optimizations of the Linux kernel and took part in developing one of the first 802.16e (WiMax Mobile) wireless MAN networking standard implementations. Soon after obtaining his diploma, he joined openlab in January 2007. Andrzej deals mostly with multi- and many-core architectures and parallel processing. Another significant area of his work is platform optimization and performance assessment.

David HORAT

CERN, Geneva - Switzerland

I was raised in Gran Canaria, a Spanish island near the African coast. There, I studied a M.Sc. in Computer Engineering at the ULPGC. Encouraged by my colleagues and friends, I decided to go abroad. I spent 6 months with an Erasmus scholarship in the German University FH NordAkademie, where I developed an eLearning platform based on Moodle and other tools. I later worked on my Master Thesis which focused on accessibility and usability on web applications. I graduated with distinction.  I am currently working as a Software Engineer in the European Organization for Nuclear Research -CERN- specialized in grid and web technologies. I have also worked at Ericsson in its R&D labs as a specialist on communication protocols. Among other things, I have participated as a Moodle mentor in the Google Summer of Code program.

Tim MUENCHEN

Bergische Universität Wuppertal - Germany

I studied computer science at the University of Applied Sciences, Münster, and got my master's degree in 2007. In 2008, I started to work on my PhD thesis at the ATLAS working group of the University of Wuppertal. I am continuing development on the user space job monitoring software, JEM, created at Wuppertal, and focus on the user interface (integration in the job submission and management tool 'ganga') and a binary tracing module allowing to monitor.(athena-) user algorithms written in C++.

Luis Fernando MUNOZ MEJĺAS

CERN, Geneva - Switzerland

I am working on a central log service for the Computer Security Team, which should allow for easier identification of ongoing attacks and faster forensics analysis of . For this project I have already developed some modules for rsyslog (in C language), as well as some database designs and queries and scripts to use them (SQL, PL/SQL, Python, C, Perl). This task involves also some understanding on SELinux policies, how to write them and how to enforce minimum privileges. I'm also a skilled C++ programmer, although probably not as efficient as I am in Perl, Python, C and bash scripting which are my "working languages". Occasionally I maintain parts of Quattor for which I'm an author. I'm mostly familiar with Linux at systems administrator, user and low-level application levels, although have some knowledge of Windows.

Malte NUHN

RWTH, Aachen University - Germany

Malte Nuhn is studying physics and computer science at RWTH Aachen University.  He is about to finish his physics Diploma in the field of Grid Computing and planning to graduate in computer science, soon. In his spare time, Malte likes hacking around Linux and free software projects.

Benjamin RADBURN SMITH

STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot – U.K.

I am a first year PhD student with the University of Manchester studying data mining and visualisation of particle physics datasets. I am currently based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK working between the CMS group and e-Science Scientific Applications Group. The visualisation techniques I am investigating include parallel coordinates and the grand tour. The aim of the project is to create a program which is compatible with ROOT that will implement these techniques. The program is being written in C++ for Linux based systems but will be developed to run on other systems as well.

David SVANTESSON

CERN, Geneva - Switzerland

I am currently a technical student at the Online group of LHCb at CERN. My main tasks are development and improvements of the control system and error tracking for the data acquisition system. My work will be part of my M.Sc. thesis in physics from Chalmers University (Sweden). In my work I mostly use C, C++ and the SCADA system PVSS. I am also familiar with other computer languages as Java, PHP, Javascript, MySQL, Matlab, LaTeX, bash scripts. I use actively and configure different Linux/UNIX systems and occasionally Windows.

Uwe WESTERHOFF

Institut für Kernphysik, Münster – Germany

I am working as a PhD student at the "Institut für Kernphysik" in Münster for the ALICE experiment. In my diploma thesis I have developed the online control software for the Transition Radiation Detector of ALICE. Currently I am involved in the development of online particle identification methods for the Transition Radiation Detector to identify electrons with high transverse momenta in pp and heavy ion collisions within a few micro seconds.  Furthermore I am the system administrator of our computer network and involved in the maintenance of a 100 CPU cluster, which is part of the ALICE computing grid.

Andres ABAD RODRIGUEZ

CERN, Geneva - Switzerland

When I arrived at CERN in 2007, I worked during a year in the control system group of IT in the Gas Control System for the LHC. Since September 2007, I am working for the European project ETICS. It provides a system for the configuration, building, testing and integration of software. We have a web interface and a command line client from where our users, like Glite, can manage their configurations, submit builds and tests and get their results (binaries and reports) in a repository. We have introduced recently the possibility of send multinode tests. Inside the team, I am responsible for some modules of our web application (Java/J2EE and AJAX with GWT), the webservices (AXIS) and the database (MySQL).

Nicola CHIAPOLINI

Universität Zürich - Switzerland

I have been working for the TT sub-detector of LHCb during both my Bachelor and my Master thesis. Since January I am back with my previous group as a PhD student. At the time of this writing my work concentrates mostly on the detector alignment.

Luigi GALLERANI

CERN, Geneva - Switzerland

My current work is in virtualization using the OracleVM technology, and adapting it to the CERN cluster infrastructure management system. This provides a transparent and Quattorised integrated layer of virtual Red Hat Enterprise and Scientific Linux machines for virtual IT-DB services hosting. I have an indepth knowledge in Networking and in GNU/Linux Operating Systems, which I use in the development of these virtualization solutions. Collaborating with the CERN openlab and using a multiprocessor computer, I am also studying the OracleVM performances. The aim of this task is to find the best load balancing configuration for the services that will run on the new cluster machines. I have good experience in OS scripting languages, imperative and OO-programming, in particular the C family. My MSc Thesis and previous work at the LHCb, gave me also skills in real time SCADA system programming. I have also become a CERN guide, and in learning more about the Particle Physics Experiments, have been able to help educate visitors.

Carlos GARCIA FERNANDEZ

CERN, Geneva - Switzerland

Coming from Spain, I studied at the University of Oviedo. Thanks to them I got the opportunity to come to CERN as a Project Associate.   During this first period at CERN, I was developing and maintaining the configurations in the infrastructure of CERN network, migrating from CISCO Firewall to IPTables Firewall. As well I was giving support to FlexLM License Management system, and using CERN Fabric Management Infrastructure (http://cern.ch/quattor) to fully automate installation and maintenance of some servers, managing Linux RPM’s software distribution and installation systems.  One year later I got an openlab Fellowship in which I am currently working and my tasks consists in the integration of Oracle VM server within CERN infrastructure. I have been working in the integration at the host level in CERN ELFms (the large scale management system) and currently I am working in the integration at the guest level, as well as the migration of application and database servers to these virtual machines. I am familiar with Unix/Linux environments, as well as Windows. I have been working with shell, perl, scripting programming, and I like to program as well in Java and Web technologies.

Belmiro Daniel RODRIGUES MOREIRA

CERN, Geneva - Switzerland

I finished in 2004 a BSc degree in Mathematics lectured at UTAD – Portugal, and in 2009 a Integrated MSc degree in Informatics and Computer Engineering lectured at FEUP – Portugal. Currently I'm working at CERN in the IT-PES group in two different virtualization projects that covers the two big use cases which have been identified at CERN:

the service consolidation project and the batch virtualization project.

The first project aims to achieve the traditional benefits of service consolidation like: decoupling hardware and system image lifetime, reduce the power requirements, maintenance advantages, etc. With the batch virtualization project the main objectives are: dynamic change of worker node types dependent on requirements; customization of images for specific use cases, possibility to mix virtual and real resources, etc.

We were able to run more than 15000 VMs managed by OpenNebula in ~500 hypervisors, to evaluate the LSF scalability. Also, I am involved in the evaluation of the Infrastructure Sharing Facility (ISF) tool by Platform Computing and participate in the HEPIX working group, particularly in the image distribution schema. I'm familiar with various virtualization and cloud technologies.

Frank VOLKMER

Bergische Universität Wuppertal- Germany

In the last months I gradually took responsibility for maintaining the ATLAS Production System Dashboard which monitors all ATLAS tasks, where they are executed, how much cpu time they use end whether they are successful or not. The ProdSys Dashboard uses the Dashboard Web Framework, which was written in Python and developed at CERN. The dashboard runs on an Apache + mod_python system at CERN. This work includes the fixing of bugs and solving problems as they arise, as well as maintaining the dashboard and carrying its technology into the next decade. We, the dashboard team, started working on a new system that will use newer, more dynamic web technologies. This will help to generate new content for the dashboards more easily. From my previous work in the private sector and at university I acquired programming skills in C, C++, Guile and Java on all relevant operating systems, including Windows XP, Mac OS X 10.5, Ubuntu and CentOS.