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.

Some thoughts on strategies how to benefit from CERN (as full member) [PDF] [PPT]