Grids meet aliens and androids

A Pangalactic Workshop on BOINC is the sort of place you might expect to meet people in Star Trek suits.

In fact, at the fourth edition of this workshop, held at the INRIA institute in Grenoble 10-12 September, the talk was not about space travel, but about volunteer computing. (“Pangalactic” is a tongue-in-cheek reference to SETI@home, or Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. It harnesses personal computers to sift through radio wave data from outer space—the most visible of volunteer computing projects since it was launched in 1999.)

SETI@home spawned BOINC, the Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing, which is now used as a general-purpose platform for volunteer computing by over 50 projects, running on about a million volunteer computers, with an aggregate processing power of over 1 petaflop as of January. While SETI@home remains
popular, the workshop showcased many other projects, and was a chance for
project developers and distributed-computing experts to discuss new directions for
volunteer computing.

Feature - Data grid for job seekers

JobGrid connects Chinese graduates with employers

Graduates from over 75 universities in China and their potential employers have a new tool to help them find each other: JobGrid.

JobGrid is the first data grid to provide an authentic, secure, user-friendly communication and decision support platform linking universities, graduates, companies and the government in China. It runs on the China Education and Research Network (CERNET).

Feature - U.S. support of CI for research

NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure: the first two years

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) has become a vital tool for scientific research and discovery. CI has the potential for revolutionizing the way science and engineering research is conducted, says Daniel Atkins, former and initial director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

Link of the week How the Large Hadron Collider Might Change the Web Scientific American writer Mark Anderson discusses how the “tsunami of raw data” expected from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will put the Globus middleware through a “trial by fire”. If project scientists can tame massive, worldwide fields of networked data and computing cycles in particle physics, he asks, might their solutions apply across the Internet—in much the same way that Berners-Lee's specialized HTML invention morphed into the very backbone of modern technological society? Read more				Image of the week EGEE 08 this week in Istanbul It's tough to enjoy the ambiance of an Istanbul sunset via the Internet, but thanks to GridTalk's GridCast you're not too far removed from what's happening at EGEE 08... Read more