 | | Image courtesy of sxc.hu. |
Life is a complicated, tricky business and we sometimes need a little guidance. In the same way, novice grid users adding their applications to the grid—also a complicated, tricky business—often benefit from a helping hand.
“We are here to be the equivalent of ‘guardian angels’ for the grid,” says Gergely Sipos, porting expert at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Sipos is the team leader of a new group within the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project. “We want to simplify a process that—in some instances—can be quite difficult.”
The Application Porting Support group is designed specifically to make it easy for new or advanced users to get their applications on the grid. Experts from the porting team work closely with application owners to understand their requirements and to identify suitable approaches, tools for the porting process and to set realistic and feasible porting scenarios. The group started their activities this last May as part of EGEE’s efforts to welcome and attract new users.
“Grid application programmers usually feel lost in the jungle of manuals, tutorials and presentations that are available on the Web,” says Sipos. “We organize this knowledge according to our clients’ needs and present it to them in a well structured way. We cut down their development effort and increase their efficiency.”
Intensive workshops and personalized training events organized by the team ensure that application owners become expert on porting tools that are relevant for them and can quickly and efficiently perform the porting process with the help of the porting team. “It is very rewarding for me,” Sipos says, “because I can see that real end users benefit from the grid and can achieve scientific results that could not be achieved without grid computing—and probably without our support.” | 
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