For one week following the live chat, experts from around the world will join us at Nature Network to answer questions and continue discussing issues raised during the live chat.

Posting questions:

• Log in to Nature Network at http://network.nature.com/
• Select the Q&A tab from the top navigation menu
• Once in the Q&A section of the site, click on the “Ask a question” link in the top right corner
• In the right column of the site you will see an online form you may use to ask your question in four easy steps:
  1. Give your question a title (i.e. to summarize your query)
  2. Use the box below to write your question in full
  3. Select a field your question is related to from the drop-down menu below – you will find the “iSGTW debate” option at the very bottom of the list
  4. Hit on the “Publish Question” tab and you’re done!
• You will be able to find your question later by clicking on the ‘Your Questions’ tab

Finding iSGTW’s questions:

• Log in to Nature Network at http://network.nature.com/
• Select the Q&A tab from the top navigation menu
• Once in the Q&A section of the site, click on the “Ask a question” link in the top right corner
• On the next page you will find a list of all questions and answers that are currently live
• By clicking on “Field” on the top of the form you will be able to browse all questions by discipline – simply select the field of your choice from the drop-down menu (you will find the “iSGTW debate” option at the very bottom of the list)

Live Chat panelists

Steven Newhouse Director, European Grid Initiative In addition to serving as the director of EGI.eu, Steven Newhouse is an active member of Open Grid Forum, the largest standards body within the grid community. Most recently, Newhouse worked at Microsoft as a program manager in the High Performance Computing group. Newhouse has also been the director of Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK, a collaborative e-Science project between the University of Southampton, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Manchester.

Dan Fraser Production Coordinator, Open Science Grid Dan Fraser is a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. Currently he is the Production Coordinator for the Open Science Grid. Formerly he was the Senior Architect for Grid Middleware at Sun Microsystems and the creator of Sun’s Technical Computing Portal. He has a PhD in Physics from Utah State University and over a decade of experience working with high performance science and commercial applications.

Vangelis Floros Technical Consultant, GRNET Vangelis Floros is a computer scientist with many years experience in distributed computing and in particular, grid computing. He has participated in a large number of European research projects including CrossGrid, DILIGENT, D4Science and EGEE series of projects. Over the years his work has involved infrastructure operations, training, application porting support and community coordination. More recently his focus has shifted to cloud computing which he perceives as a re-incarnation of the grid computing concept. Currently he leads the infrastructure operations activity at the StratusLab European project.

Philip Blood Senior Scientific Specialist, PSC Advisor to Campus Champions, TeraGrid Philip Blood received his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Utah in 2008 where he used massively parallel molecular dynamics simulations to study how proteins remodel cellular membranes. In 2007 Blood joined the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center as a Senior Scientific Specialist in the Scientific Applications and User Support group. He currently works with scientists in the fields of computational chemistry, biophysics, and various other disciplines to advance science through supercomputing. Philip has recently taken a leading role in TeraGrid’s Campus Champions program, an effort to help more researchers at U.S. institutions take full advantage of TeraGrid resources.

Marc-Elian Bégin StratusLab Activity Leader Co-Founder, SixSq With over 15 years in the software industry, Marc-Elian Bégin has had the opportunity to experience all phases of software development and contribute to the delivery of over 12 software systems. In 2007 Bégin co-founded SixSq, which provides integration and testing for complex and distributed services. Presently, Bégin is serving as the StratusLab activity leader at SixSq; StratusLab is an EU-funded open source project aiming to integrate clouds and grids.

Carl Christensen Chief Software Architect, Quake-Catcher Network, Stanford University Carl Christensen received his Bachelor in Engineering degree from Georgia Tech, and his Master’s in Computer Science from Temple University. Christensen has been involved in volunteer computing since 2003, when he was appointed Chief Software Architect of the climateprediction.net project at Oxford University, the world’s largest climate modeling experiment. He worked on and adopted the BOINC volunteer computing platform shortly thereafter, and is now leading the development of the Quake-Catcher Network for Stanford University.

Question and Answer Experts

Over the week following the live chat, a number of other experts from around the world will be joining us to discuss these issues and answer your questions.

David Anderson

Expertise: Volunteer computing; Grid computing
Research Scientist, UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory
Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, University of Houston

David Anderson is perhaps best known for his work as the project lead for BOINC, the well-known volunteer computing platform pioneered by SETI. His research areas include volunteer computing, distributed systems, operating systems, realtime and multimedia systems, computer graphics, and computer music.

Robert Engel

Expertise: Grid computing
Grid Computing Systems Administrator, LIGO Caltech

In his capacity as the grid computing systems administrator for LIGO Caltech, Robert Engel is a regular contributor to the Open Science Grid.

Ravi Vadapalli

Expertise: Grid computing; High performance computing
Research Scientist, High Performance Computing Center
Adjunct Professor of Petroleum Engineering, Texas Tech University

Ten years experience in high performance computing, grid computing application development and support, fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations, and industry-academia partnerships. Research interests in energy exploration and cancer biomedicine.