Dear Simone,

in the last few years Virgo, the Gravitational-wave experiment at the European Gravitational Observatory in Italy, is extending and upgrading its distributed computing infrastructure in collaboration with the US-based LIGO Scientific Collaboration (and partially with KAGRA, the Japanese observatory), adopting architectures and tools mostly developed and adopted by the HEP community (HTCondor, Rucio, CVMFS,...) and creating a shared computing infrastructure.

In the past years we have been using computing resources at several WLCG sites: besides our “Tier-1” centres at CNAF and CC-IN2P3, PIC, Cyfronet, UCLouvain, Wigner, SURFsara and the NIKHEF Tier-1 have provided dedicated or opportunistic resources to Virgo, and this will grow in the future with the upcoming O4 observational run scheduled to begin in March 2023 and even more with the enhanced sensitivity foreseen for O5 in 2025-2026.

So, in order to enhance our coordination with Computing Centres and other experiment collaborations, we would like to apply for Observer status in the WLCG Collaboration.

I will also add that the Einstein Telescope Collaboration, which is designing the next-generation European Gravitational-wave observatory, is starting to plan for its first organised Mock Data Challenges; waiting for  its computing activities to structure themselves, this could also be an informal way of keeping in touch with that community as well.

Thanks,
Stefano Bagnasco

Computing coordinator, AdvancedVirgo collaboration
Einstein Telescope Collaboration e-Infrastructure Board cochair