Content about European Grid Initiative

December 8, 2010

Korean-based researcher Soonwook Hwang muses on his experiences using the grid.

November 17, 2010

Announcement - e-Science Talk is coming to ERINA4Africa, Helsinki, Dec 9-10

Announcement - e-Science Talk is coming to ERIN4Africa, Helsinki, 9-10 December Due to the success of e-Concertation in Geneva this month, e-Science Talk has been invited to become a media partner at the 2010 Euro-Africa Week on ICT Research and e-Infrastructures, to be held in Helsinki, Finland on 7-10 December 7-10, 2010. We will be blogging live on GridCast from this four-day conference, which is supported by the European Commission, the African Union Commission and the Finnish government’s ministries for foreign affairs, employment and economy. The agenda is: • 7-8, Dec, 2010 — “3rd Euro-Africa Cooperation Forum on ICT Research” • 9-10, Dec, 2010 — “2010 Euro-Africa e-Infrastructures Conference” • 10, Dec, 2010 — Lab Visits Registration is free of charge, but pre-registration is required. Registration forms are available at the following l

November 3, 2010

Feature - From grids to clouds and beyond: GRNET supports Greek researchers

Project Profile - From grids to clouds and beyond: GRNET supports Greek researchers

The Acropolis from Philipapou Hill at sunset, Image courtesy Tim Rogers, stock.xchng

All Greek universities get their internet from one source: GRNET (Greek Research and Education Network), a company supported by the Greek state, which connects them both to each other and to the larger pan-European academic network, GÉANT.
GRNET’s mission is to get universities on line, to provide computing power and storage, and to develop services for researchers. Not the least of which is providing technical know-how and supporting schools and universities in Greece. “GRNET is actually a human network — this is the most important thing about it,” says Kostas Koumantaros, member of GRNET in Athens. “We transfer know-how between universities throughout Greece. It is a good vehicle to both promote research in Greece and for us to learn from our international collabora

October 20, 2010

Image of the Week - e-Science at the Globe

Image courtesy e-Science Talk

Do you want to know what e-science and e-infrastructures can do for your research?
If so, an important event about e-science is happening at the CERN Globe on Thursday 4th November 2010: the 8th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting. This event, organized by e-Science Talk, will gather key figures in the e-infrastructures' community and discuss the evolving distributed computing landscape. The aim of the two-day event is to talk about the long-term sustainability of e-infrastructure scientific research in Europe.
Keep your schedules free for Thursday 4th and Friday 5th November 2010: watch the event live on the upcoming webcast and join the online discussions to have your say.
More information to follow shortly so keep your eyes on the web.

September 29, 2010

Interview - Kostas Glinos peers into his crystal ball

Image courtesy Corentin Chevalier, eScienceTalk

Kostas Glinos is a member of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Information Society and Media — and he just presented the European Grid Initiative with a 25-million euro contract in a brief ceremony onstage at the start of the EGI Technical Forum on 14 September. iSGTW caught up with him afterward, during a coffee break held in the middle of the poster session floor. We asked him about the significance of the EC’s backing, his hopes for EGI, and his ideas as to what it all means for the future.
iSGTW: What was the significance of the contract presentation today?Glinos: EGI is the culmination of an effort over eight years to look for a sustainable, long-term commitment from European countries, supplemented by the European Commission (EC). Of a projected 73 million euro cost, 25 million is coming from the EC, with the rest from member states. We n

September 22, 2010

Image of the Week - EGI Video

EGI Video Answers All

(Click on image above to go to YouTube video.) Original courtesy BELIEF-II

Do you still find yourself trying to get a better sense of EGI and EGI.eu, even after the Technical Forum last week?
Then check out this video from the BELIEF-II project.

September 15, 2010

Interview - One persons view, behind the scenes of middleware

Feature - One person’s view, behind the scenes of middleware

EMI tries to pull together three different middlewares. Image courtesy EMI

John White, security team leader of EMI, discusses his work.iSGTW: Can you explain to me what EMI stands for?White: European Middleware Initiative. EMI unifies under one project the three middlewares that have been put together over the past six years: gLite, ARC and Unicore.
Each of these middleware do different things; for example, Unicore runs inside high-performance computing centers like a ‘monster’ supercomputer, while gLite typically runs over a distributed system, such as a farm of 1,000 or 2,000 batch nodes — which can be anything from a cluster of batch nodes or a group of white, ‘pizza box’ type home-PCs. We used to have these at CERN up until a few years ago.iSGTW: What is your role?White: I have a few roles; my most important is as security area leader of the security components of all three midd

September 8, 2010

Feature - BigGrid's big idea

Feature - BiG Grid’s big idea

Image courtesy BiG Grid

With the EGI Technical Forum coming up next week, iSGTW thought ths would be a good time to learn more about one of the Forum’s sponsors, BiG Grid.
Modern detectors, medical imaging instruments and micro-arrays produce huge volumes of data, far beyond the storage capacities of conventional computing — thus calling for ever-increasing enlargement of infrastructure.
To help solve this problem, the Netherlands-based BiG Grid project is turning to the grid as a place to combine data, analyze it and allow scientists to conduct research in a wide range of disciplines. BiG Grid is a collaborative effort between Nikhef (the National Institute for Sub-atomic Physics), NBIC (Netherlands Bioinformatics Center) and NCF (the National Computing Facilities foundation). “Our goal is to build and roll-out a nationwide, grid-based, e-science infrastructure,” said Arjen Van Rijn, chairman of the BiG Grid executiv

September 8, 2010

Feature - People behind EGI: Tiziana Ferrari

Profile - People behind the European Grid Initiative: Tiziana Ferrari

Image courtesy EGI

The European Grid Infrastructure’s role is to support research and collaboration across the continent by providing seamless, instant access to computing resources. But who has the job of making sure things actually work? Meet EGI’s Chief Operations Officer, Tiziana Ferrari. She spoke recently with iSGTW to tell us what is rewarding about her job, what is challenging and why it is important.

iSGTW: Describe what you do for EGI.Ferrari: I am responsible for coordinating the operations of the infrastructure across Europe. The user doesn’t care whether a resources is in Spain or in France, they just need it to work — that is my job. In EGI though, every country is responsible for its own operations.
But EGI needs to coordinate this and ensure that everyone is using the same protocols. That is my role. I need to make sure the production and accounting infrastruc

September 8, 2010

Image of the Week - iSGTW in Amsterdam

iSGTW in Amsterdam

Image courtesy GridTalk. (Click on image for large, PDF version)

Coming to you from Amsterdam is the EGI Technical Forum, the first event after taking over the reins from EGEE. Thanks to GridTalk’s GridCast, you can now get (nearly) the same experience as those attending in person.You will be able to get the latest via twitter, see and hear events by podcast, and enjoy the highlights .Held from 14- to 17- September, this event promises to showcase grid technologies and connect developers, users and newcomers to distributed computing. The major theme of the meeting, achieved through technical sessions, a demonstration and exhibition area, networking space and events, will be to establish collaborations between the new and the current European Distributed Computing Infrastructure projects to meet the needs and requirements of the research community.
Can’t make it in person? With GridCast, you can be there in virtual form to catch the latest &mdas

September 1, 2010

Feature - People behind EGI: Steve Brewer steps in as the voice of the user

Image courtesy Steve Brewer

With the EGI technical forum coming up in a few weeks, readers may want to know more about the people behind the scenes.
Much of the organization’s success will hinge upon its ability to foster strong communities between users and resource providers. Who will act as a communication point between these two groups? Steve Brewer, a long-time member of the European Grid Community, has recently been appointed chief community officer for EGI.eu, the new organization responsible for coordinating the European Grid Infrastructure.
iSGTW: Where does EGI.eu fit into the grand scheme of things?
Brewer: From physicists, to chemists, to geologists, many European researchers need distributed computing for their work. While these researchers previously used an infrastructure coordinating by EGEE (the project Enabling Grids for E-sciencE), the same infrastructure is now coordinate

June 2, 2010

Profile: EGI director, Steven Newhouse

Profile: EGI’s director, Steven Newhouse

The new director of the organization that will coordinate Europe’s grid infrastructure, at the gala EGEE User Forum dinner in Uppsala, Sweden. Image courtesy Corentin Chevalier, GridTalk

Steven Newhouse was recently appointed director of EGI.eu, a new, long-term organization tasked with coordinating the European Grid Infrastructure. Headquartered in Amsterdam, it will support Europe’s National Grid Initiatives as they operate the infrastructure which was built by the projects DataGrid, EGEE-I, -II and -III. He will leave his post at CERN as EGEE technical director to head EGI.eu (and the EGI-InSPIRE project). Former iSGTW editor Danielle Venton sat down with him to ask a few questions.
iSGTW: How would you describe EGI.eu?
Newhouse: EGI.eu is a group of people dedicated to working with colleagues in National Grid Infrastructure across Europe, and making those resources available to a diverse set of user communities across t

May 26, 2010

Feature - ARGUS keeps a sure watch always

Upon the death of Argus, Hera honored her faithful watchman by gathering his many eyes and placing them on the tail of a peacock. Image courtesy Gari.Baldi, under Creative Commons license.

In classical Greek mythology, a multi-eyed, insomniac giant named “Argus” was employed by Hera to keep an eye on the doings of her husband Zeus — mightiest of gods.
Argus was extremely vigilant; an ancient poet wrote that “. . . sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always.”
So it was appropriate that “ARGUS” became the name of a newly created authorization service to observe and protect Europe’s grid infrastructure. Overseen by the European Grid Infrastructure (which is in turn coordinated by the European Grid Initiative), ARGUS is designed to be a secure and efficient means of offering a single authorization and authentication point for multiple services.
ARGUS works in a series of s

May 5, 2010

Feature - From EGEE to EGI: Plain talk with Bob Jones and Steven Newhouse

At the Uppsala Gala Dinner, Bob Jones of EGEE handed over to Steven Newhouse of EGI his most prized possession — a crown made from all the name tags he collected from conferences in the past six years. Image courtesy GridTalk

After six years, on 1 May, EGEE will hand over responsibility for the world’s largest grid infrastructure to a new organization dedicated to its coordination and development (EGI.eu), and its newly elected director, Steven Newhouse.
During its lifetime, EGEE — Enabling Grids for E-SciencE — assembled a world-wide infrastructure of CPU cores, hosted by computing centers around the world. Each month, about 13 million jobs are executed on the EGEE Grid.
This massive multi-disciplinary production infrastructure was led until now by Bob Jones who initially, like Steven, held the position of technical director at EGEE, and quickly advanced to project director.
Du

April 7, 2010

Image - Do you speak grid?

Image of the Week - Do you speak grid?

Image courtesy GridTalk

Coming to you live from Sweden is the EGEE UserForum, the last event before handing over the reigns to EGI. Thanks to GridTalk’s GridCast, you can get much the same experience as those attending in person.You can get the latest via twitter, see and hear events by podcast, and enjoy the highlights .Held from 12 April to 15 March, the event promises to showcase grid technologies and connect developers, users and newcomers to distributed computing.
Can’t make it in person? With GridCast, you will be there virtually to catch the latest — minus the region's traditional repast of pickled herring, shellfish and aquavit (a chilled drink which the San Francisco Chronicle said is the source of over 9,000 Swedish drinking songs).

February 10, 2010

Opinion - Supporting the arts and humanities with e-science

Opinion: Supporting the arts and humanities with e-science

There’s a reason why certain tools become classics, almost indispensable for everyday life. Image courtesy Annette Gulick, stock.xchng

Supporting really useful general tools is often the best way to support specialists, says EGEE’s Danielle Venton.
The early days of the World Wide Web were primarily an exclusive, though not a closed, party. Its main attendees were elites in the physics and computer science communities.
Today, the bulk of the developed and developing world is involved. Every sector of society puts the Web to use: your local dance company, church and city council likely all have Web sites. Through these you can learn about and communicate with them in ways not possible before.
Similarly, managing data with e-Infrastructures (distributed computing systems and the like) was, like the Web, initially confined to specialized communities. Today, however, nearly all researchers, including those in the a

November 25, 2009

Feature - OpenAIRE: archive access anytime, anywhere

Peggy Bacon in mid-air backflip, Bondi Beach, Sydney, 1937. Open Access can breathe new energy and productivity in to the work of research. Image courtesy State Library of New South Wales, Australia

If scientific progress was a living organism that could be fed and nurtured, the swift, free exchange of ideas would be a key nutrient.
“Easy and free access to the latest knowledge in strategic areas is crucial for EU research competitiveness. This open access pilot is an important step towards achieving the ‘fifth freedom,’ the free movement of knowledge amongst Member States, researchers, industry and the public at large,” said EU Commissioner for Science and Research Janez Potočnik last year. “Beyond, it is a fair return to the public of research that is funded by EU money.”
Formally embracing the open access ethic, the European Commission has decided to require that results from research it f

April 22, 2009

Feature - Application porting group celebrates its first birthday

Feature - Application Porting Support Group celebrates its first birthday

Gergely Sipos (MTA SZTAKI) and Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti (UCM) with the certificate for the best infrastructure demo of EGEE'08. Image courtesy Gergely Sipos

The Application Porting Support Group, EGEE’s service that helps end users get their existing applications to work on the grid, is now entering its second year. A lot of work went into the group’s first year successes — they even won “best demo award” at the EGEE’08 Conference. What kind of an experience has it been for them?“It was a busy year for us,” said Gergely Sipos, coordinator of the porting group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. “We had to set up the group and integrate members from Hungary, Italy, Spain, France and Taiwan. We needed to define the working environments, infrastructures, protocols and the support cycle itself.”Sipos said that the group tries to fulfill e

March 18, 2009

iSGTW - Editorial, Women in Grid

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

March 4, 2009

iSGTW Feature - Stop the presses

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

February 18, 2009

iSGTW Feature - Blue Gene for Africa

Feature - Blue Gene for Africa Image courtesy of the Meraka Institute IBM donated a supercomputer to South Africa's Center for High-Performance Computing, as part of a $120 million investment in sub-Saharan Africa. Dubbed "Blue Gene" and designed and built in collaboration with the Department of Energy's NNSA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, it is capable of 11.5 teraflops, or 11.5 trillion floating point operations per second, or flops. ("Flops" are a standard measure of a computer's performance.) In other words, it is currently the fastest scientific computer on the entire African continent.The computer system is part of a larger initiative, known as "Blue Gene for Africa" (BG4A), that aims to build high-end computing capacity in the continent. The project aims to develop infrastructure, encourate collaborative science, and promote Africa's human capital. As such, it will be available free of charge to any qualifying African institution for use on advanced

February 4, 2009

iSGTW Feature - G-eclipse: easier interface to both grids and clouds

Feature - G-eclipse: easier interface to both grids and clouds The g-Eclipse interface in action.Image courtesy of g- Eclipse Consortium The g- Eclipse Consortium released the g- Eclipse framework, which developers claim will provide an easy-to-use workbench for accessing both grid and cloud infrastructures. The software provides a graphical workbench that enables seamless access with the same simplicity as accessing the Internet from a browser. "This enables interoperabilty between different grid and cloud infrastructures on the client side," said Harald Kornmayer, a researcher at NEC Laboratories Europe, who led the project.It currently supports EGEE's gLite grid middleware (aimed for scientific domains), and the GRIA middleware (used by industry and commerce), as well as AmazonWeb Services' cloud computing and storage offerings.A key feature of the g- Eclipse workbench is its independence from the underlying grid and cloud technology. "We started with the goal of accessing available scientific grid infra

October 8, 2008

iSGTW Feature - Celebrating the development of the LHC grid

Feature - Celebrating the development of the LHC grid Wolfgang von Rüden unveils the cermonial globe sculpture, before an audience in CERN's globe-shaped building. Image courtesy of GridFest Last Friday, 3 October, grid-enthusiasts gathered—physically and virtually—from around the world for a special event: to celebrate the success of the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. “After the very successful start of the Large Hadron Collider on 10 September, it is now the turn of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to celebrate the transition from a development and deployment phase into operation,” said Wolfgang von Rüden, head of CERN’s Information Technology department, in his welcome address to the 250 grid enthusiasts gathered in CERN’s ‘globe’ building. “I am very happy to tell you that we are ready to handle the unprecedented flood of data that will be generated by the LHC.”In his address “CERN and LHC: their place in global science” CERN&

October 8, 2008

iSGTW Feature - Istanbul roundup

Feature - Istanbul roundup 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

October 8, 2008

iSGTW Feature - Stateside at the bi-continental LHC Grid Fest

Feature - Stateside celebration at the bi-continental LHC Grid Fest Upper left, Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, opens the festivities. Upper right, from l-to-r, Miron Livny, Don Petravick of Fermilab and DOE’s OHEP, Susan Turnbull (half hidden), and Patricia McBride. Bottom, Steve Cotter at the podium, and broadcast images from CERN and other sites. Image courtesy of Reidar Hahn, Fermilab. Three weeks after the US-LHC community celebrated in the wee hours as the first beam circulated in the Large Hadron Collider across the Atlantic, staff and supporters gathered again in Fermilab’s signature high rise. Via satellite, they co-celebrated the official start-up of the world-wide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) with their colleagues around the U.S. and abroad.As the U.S. Tier-1 site for the CMS experiment, Fermilab has contributed significantly to the grid development for the experiment, and is an important Open Science Grid site, both in terms of resources and expertise. The same is true of Brookhaven National Lab wi