One highlight of EGEE ’08 was the Gala Dinner, held on the Bosphorus in a converted waterfront building next to a mosque. Rumor says that the restaurant was originally a house built for the daughter of a sultan. Image courtesy of Dan Drollette

What has 545 people from 48 countries, 285 presentations, 97 sessions, 12 demonstrations, and 50 partners?

The EGEE conference in Istanbul.

“There was an excitement here,” said Bob Jones, EGEE project manager. “It all came together.”

Highlights, said Jones, included a Best Application Presentation award given to the CYCLOPS team of Marco Verlato (INFN), Stefano Dal Pra (INFN) and Valerio Angelini (CNR-IMAA)  for their  “G-RISICO: A Wild Fire Risk Assessment application running on an advanced Grid infrastructure.”  The team said that their approach could help civil protection authorities predict not only wildfire, but the risks of many types of natural disasters.

Peter Kacsuk, director of EDGES, and Bob Jones, project manager of EGEE, after signing the first memorandum of understanding.  Image courtesy of Asli Zengin

Of EGEE and EDGES

Another highlight was the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between EGEE and EDGES (Enabling Desktop Grids for E-Science). The first of its kind, “It will bring together the large, community-based approach of EGEE with the volunteer, BOINC-style desktop world,” said Peter Kacsuk, director of EDGES and president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Such an approach could potentially aid researchers working in fields as diverse as fusion, biomedicine, engineering and chemistry, he added.

An outstanding range of posters covering topics from high energy physics to bioinformatics to middleware development was displayed, and best poster competition closely fought. This year, conference delegates voted for Javier Rojas Balderrama’s  “NEUROLOG: Neuroscience Application Workflows Execution on the EGEE Grid.”

The demonstration competition winner was “EGEE Application Porting Support Group” presented by Gergely SIPOS. Judges said that they were particularly impressed by the speed with which this group has got up and running in just a matter of months since the start of EGEE-III, designing the application, porting it and  now training other teams.

Turning to best application demo, runner up was “Grid-Enabled Virtual Screening Service based on Grid Application Platform” from Mason HSIUNG, Lee Hurng-Chun, Ueng Wei-Long, Chen Hsin-Yen, Eric Yen and Simon Lin.

The next EGEE User Forum, OGF25, will be held in Catania, Italy from 2-to-6  March 2009, and hosted by INFN.

—Dan Drollette, iSGTW, and Catherine Gater, EGEE