The group hosted a very successful workshop dedicated to exploring how knowledge of QCD radiation can be used to develop optimal discovery tools for new physics at the LHC. The workshop consisted of formal talks on the 1st and 2nd of November followed by a few days of informal discussions and collaboration between participants. More information at http://www.hep.manchester.ac.uk/theory/soft-2010/

The Tier2 technology refresh is now complete and all the hardware is online and usable increasing the ‘CPU density’ by a factor 12 !

960 cores have been put online at the beginning of September and have now had two solid months of running in production without problems. ATLAS got the lion share in terms of CPU used but other experiments had the opportunity to use the additional computing power, as the pie chart shows:

540 TB of storage have gone live between the end of September - mid October bringing us to a total of 628TB of usable space. Currently 618TB are dedicated to Atlas. The remaining 10TB are shared among the other experiments supported by the Tier2. The biggest "secondary" users are currently SuperNEMO with less than 500GB and other tiny usage by Biomed, CALICE and H1. (A. Forti).

If you have any news for the monthly newsletter, please send them to soldner@fnal.gov.

This year's Christmas Meeting will be held December 20/21. The meeting organiser will be Un-Ki with short presentations by all members of the group. The Group's Christmas Party will be on December 20 at Bem Brasil Churrascaria (students £25 and staff £40) Thanks to Anne Morrow and Peter Millington for organising the Party.

Good news for the Tevatron run extension: The HEPAP Panel advising the Department of Energy (DoE) has supported an extension of the run until 2014. The BBC reported it on its web site. At the same time, the LHC has been successfully accumulating data, currently about 40 pb-1 and is now switching to heavy ion running for the next months.

Brian and Gia posing for the Geek Calendar.