Content about EGEE

Feature - A week at CERN

Ilaria (second from left) lunching with the EGEE project office. Image courtesy Ilaria Marchese

In mid-June, the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project office hosted Ilaria Marchese, a student from the International School of Geneva, on work-experience for a week. Ilaria, who will be 15 in August, shares her thoughts on her week, women in science and research, and life at CERN. What did you think about spending a week in the EGEE project office?
“It was really interesting. I hadn’t heard of the project before, so I was amazed at the reach of EGEE’s work — it’s practically everywhere. It’s in more than 50 countries and helps all types of research. I was also impressed by how much work goes into the project to help people use this service.” What interests you about science?
“Science is fascinating — I love understanding how and why things work. I recently wrote a report on holograms for school . . . they seem

Feature - Do more with MATLAB

Using MATLAB on EGEE middleware, researchers can make a better laser - such as this solid state Cornellium Cn3+ laser created by a sapphire crystal. Image courtesy MATLAB Central

Researchers from disciplines as far apart as lasers and finance have a new computing tool at their fingertips: MATLAB can now run on Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) computing power. The software is a high-level language and interactive environment that enables users to perform computationally intensive tasks faster than with traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran. Widely regarded as a  powerful piece of simulation software, for use in everything from optimizing rocket launch control settings to vector analysis, it is now fully compatible with any grid computing system using gLite middleware.“Our motivation for incorporating this tool was rather straightforward. MATLAB is one of the most popular and important general-purpose scientific software

Announcement - Grid solutions track at Linux Days, 5 June, Geneva, Switzerland

Image courtesy LinuxDays. Click on image above for full-size official poster 

Can grid technology give your company a competitive advantage? The Grid Solutions Track organized by the EGEE Business Forum, 5 June 2009, during LinuxDays 2009 is designed to illustrate how IT strategists from both the private and public sectors can benefit by adopting grid computing. “EGEE is now in a position to take a variety of solutions to the market through several commercial companies offering gLite based solutions,” says Steven Newhouse, Technical Director of EGEE. “This ‘Grid Solutions’ track is a prime opportunity to showcase what EGEE and gLite has to offer.” Experts will explain the options that are available for implementation, and advise on how to avoid pitfalls. The company Constellation Technologies will offer a snapshot of their higher level, value-added serv

Announcement - GridCafé launches in Spanish

Image courtesy of gridcafe.org

GridCafé, an award-winning Web site aimed at introducing the marvels of grid computing to a wider audience, has this week launched a Spanish language version, making the Web site available to an estimated 300 million Spanish speakers around the world.The expansion comes as part of a partnership between European Commission project GridTalk and REUNA, a non-profit collaboration of 15 Chilean universities, the AURA Observatory and the Chilean National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research. “In REUNA we believe that by using innovative technologies we can help to make a better world. When we first saw GridCafé we fell in love with its great contents and the simple fashion in which they are explained; we felt we needed to share that with the Chilean education and research community, and also with the rest of Latin America,” said Paola Arellano, REUNA Executiv

Feature - EDGeS helps us all talk to each other

With AutoDock, biologists can predict how small molecules will interact with known larger molecules - vital to evaluating candidates for new drugs. Image courtesy www.YASARA.org

Like Bill Murray adrift in Japan in the movie “Lost in Translation,” things can go awry when service grids and volunteer grids try to talk to each other.
Service grids, such as EGEE, often involve large institutions whose work method is centered around collaboration — to the point where participants often know each other personally. To ensure security, resources and users pass through an accreditation process, and the resulting “certificate” provides proof that this occurred successfully. The certificate is key to allowing jobs to be submitted and completed.
On the other hand, volunteer systems — such as BOINC or XtremWeb-based desktop grids — consist of large numbers of personal computers linked together by individuals w

Feature - PanDA makes huge job sets more bearable

Simplified view of core PanDA architecture. Click on image to see the complete diagram in a larger size. Image courtesy of BNL.

Keeping track of huge job sets processed on hundreds of compute clusters around the world through the LHC Computing Grid might send the most organized of logical thinkers into a tizzy. The PanDA (Production and Distributed Analysis) system, developed for the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider, lets scientists stay cool while it takes charge of distributing jobs, collecting results and managing workflow.An important feature of PanDA is that it allows the user to submit one job, called a pilot job, which coordinates a series of jobs that the user has put together and configured. When launched, the pilot job contacts the PanDA server, which in turn locates available resources and sends the collected jobs to run based on their relative priorities. The pilot system manages the workflow efficiently,

Feature - Editorial: Women in grid computing Engineer Mayling Wong examines an accelerator  component at Fermilab. Image courtesy Fermilab Visual Media Services Editor’s note: In honor of International Women's Month, iSGTW looks at the role of women in computing, science and technology.In a November 17, 2008 story in The New York Times, “What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?” Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells of her experience at computer camp, in which she discovered that there were six boys to every girl. (And later, she found that only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. were female.) The article says: “She published a 124-page paper, ‘Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?’ that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field,” and notes that her paper was published in 1991.Computer science has changed since that time.Today, there a

Feature - Stop the presses! Image courtesy of Luca de Luca, sxc.hu. Here's a sampling of the latest headlines, blogs, twitters and "newsbites" on what has been happening so far this week: *Amsterdam chosen to host EGI.org Amsterdam was selected as the host city at the last EGI policy board meeting in Catania on Monday 2 March 2009, ahead of seven other European cities. “The choice of the location of the EGI.org headquarters is a further and decisive step towards the implementation of a sustainable European grid infrastructure,” said Gaspar Barreira, chairman of the EGI Policy Board. “From now on we will be all mobilised for the real establishment of a new international research infrastructure in Europe, where a large number of countries will put together and operate the world’s largest grid computing facility.”"We're very honored that the European grid community has chosen Amsterdam to host EGI.org," said Patrick Aerts, Director of the National Compute Facility (NCF), t

Link of the week - Fly GridCast to the EGEE user forum and OGF25 in Sicily Image courtesy of Andre-Pierre Olivier Can’t make it to Catania this March?Let GridCast take you there – virtually.Bloggers are providing a sneak-peek behind the scenes of the 4th EGEE User Forum/ OGF25 & OGF-Europe's 2nd International Event, to be held the first week of March in Catania, Sicily.The User Forum is an annual, multi-faceted, key event in the grid community, featuring keynote talks delivered by high-profile experts from business, government and research.The bloggers will be part of a grid podcast, or “GridCast,” that allows readers to virtually share in the forum, as if they were really within view of Mount Etna.Coordinated by the GridTalk project, the GridCast includes podcast interviews as well as a blog, and is being produced live at the User Forum — an event which attracts hundreds of participants."Podcasting is another example of how connected and flexible our world is becoming," says Craig L

  Image of the week - ThIS cancer therapy  ThIS is an acronym for Therapeutic Irradiation Simulator for cancer therapy, which simulates the irradiation of a patient with carbon ion beams in order to allow clinicians to compute the 3D dose distributions inside the patient for a computer-aided tomography (CT) scan.Such simulations are very computing intensive, requiring thousands of hours on a single CPU. But by putting ThIS on the EGEE Grid, one simulation can be split into independent sub-simulations executed concurrently on different CPUs, speeding up the job.The project is now being integrated into the OpenGATE project. The developers — Sorina Camarasu, Tristan Glatard, Laurent Guigues, Thibault Frisson and David Sarrut, of CNRS in Lyon, France — say “The results are promising and we are confident that this advanced submission method will help the simulator to reach a larger research and medical community. Moreover, since most users need a higher-level graphical user in

Observing the grid Peer through Grid Observatory to explore the world of the grid.  Image copyright © 2005-2008 David Opie What was once lost has now been found—and stored.Thanks to the Grid Observatory, people in the esoteric field of studying the behavior of large, distributed systems have been given a gift: a trove of data. Like astronomers who peer through a telescope to explore the solar system, researchers in grids and complex systems are able to examine Grid Observatory’s data repository to find new patterns in the global behavior of the grid. The Grid Observatory, a sub-set of Enabling Grids for E-sciencE’s applications group, opened its doors—via a Web portal—this autumn. Through the portal, researchers can access anonymous grid traces, collected and stored through the Grid Observatory application, and information about those traces, for an overall picture of the grid. Grid traces, explains Cécile Germain of Grid Observatory, are signatures of grid usage. These take many f

Announcement - 2nd International winter school in grid computing Curl up with your computer at home this winter. Image courtesy of akvis.com  The 2nd International Winter School in Grid Computing (IWSGC’09) will bring together world experts and enthusiastic students. Important Dates:Applications open: 24 November 2008Applications close: 12 January 2009 School Dates: 16 February – 30 March 2009 (20 hours/week)Pre-course exercises open: 15 December 2008 – 22 January 2009 Venue: OnlineTarget audience: researchers from any country who have recently started or are about to start working on grid projectsContacts: iwsgc@lists.nesc.ac.uk School Web site Sponsors: EGEE, OSG, OGF IWSGC’09 will examine the conceptual and practical underpinnings of today’s grids. Experts will provide practical exercises, discuss the challenges of building and sustaining e-Infrastructure, report its rapid influence on the way we research, design and make decisions. They will share their vision of the developments and challeng