Content about Infrastructure

Read about how the EpiCollect application can help field researchers gather data.

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

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

Announcement - ESFRI and e-IRG publish ‘Blue Paper’ on e-Infrastructure

Photo courtesy  ESFRI

The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) has just released a report about the current trends, issues and policy areas for users of Europe's e-Infrastructure services.
Topics that are covered include:

Networks
Computing
Middleware
e-infrastructure services to support scientific research.
e-infrastructure as a European service.
Digital research infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.
e-science and technology infrastructure for biodiversity data and observatories.
And much more . . .

The full report can be downloaded in pdf form.

Announcement - New European Petaflop supercomputer available in 2011

Photo courtesy PRACE

In 2011, the 1.6 Petaflop French supercomputer, Curie, will be installed and available for use. Powered by more than 90,000 processor cores, it will be exclusively dedicated to European research and available for all fields of science, including high-energy and plasma physics, climatology and much more.
“It is crucial to have high computing power to simulate, with the most possible realism, the past of our climate, the current conditions and its future evolution according to various scenarios,” said Jean Jouzel, vice-president of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Scientists and engineers will also be able to use Curie’s simulations to explore the properties of various materials, improve aircraft and car construction, design better drugs, understand the intricate molecular functions of the human body and conduct simulations that are impractical in reality.
Cur

Announcement - ESFRI and e-IRG endorse “Blue Paper” on e-Infrastructure

Photo courtesy of ESFRI

In October 2009 ESFRI invited the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) to produce a report, or “Blue Paper”, on e-Infrastructure services, enabling more efficient e-Infrastructure support for the science that is done by the ESFRI Roadmap projects. The emerging trend of science as a trans-disciplinary phenomenon requires on the policy-level joint efforts from the enabling technology platforms experts and the developers of the pan-European and global research infrastructure organisations. This “Blue Paper” was delivered to ESFRI at the beginning of July 2010, and endorsed by the ESFRI plenum at the ESFRI delegates meeting, on Friday 24 September 2010.
“I appreciate the close cooperation between e-IRG and ESFRI and look forward for an even more intensive and broadened cooperation in the next years” says ESFRI chair Beatrix Vierkorn-Rudolph. &l

Feature - Project profile: ESFRI

Image courtesy GridTalk

So, just what is ESFRI?The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) is a European Commission initiative whose role is to guide policymaking on Research Infrastructures (RIs) in Europe. ESFRI projects span social and biomedical sciences, earth and physical sciences, energy, infrastructures and analytical facilities.
The ESFRI projects are detailed in the ESFRI Roadmap, which was last updated in 2008. A new version of this document is due to be released in 2010 and will include also input from the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG), a body which defines and recommends best practices for pan-European e-Infrastructure efforts.
But with such wide scope and vision, the ESFRI projects will place large demands on the storage, processing and networking services of Europe’s e-Infrastructures. To address this, the European e-Infrastructure Forum (EEF) has released a report addressing the future requiremen

Link of the Week: the Virtual Goody Bag

Image courtesy SIENA

SIENA (the abbreviation for the Standards and Interoperability for eInfrastructure implemeNtation initiAtive) is an organization devoted to developing a roadmap that will identify trends in computing — such as the interplay between clouds and grid computing.
The European-based organization just had a workshop last night, in which they handed out a goody bag.
But theirs is different from most, in that instead of the usual memory sticks, their goodies are entirely virtual: links to electronic documenets, keynote videos, a summary presentation, the GridBriefing annual, and more.
Check out the Siena Virtual Goody Bag!

Feature - Collaboration matchmaking in VIVO

An example of the sort of social network diagram that could be generated using VIVO data. This one maps co-authored papers. The line color denotes the first year that the connected researchers co-authored papers. The node color shows the number of times that author has been cited, and the node size indicates the number of papers that researcher has authored.
To see a larger version of the image, including a list of some of the upcoming features in VIVO, please click on the image.
Image courtesy of the project briefing given by Dean Krafft and Valerie Davis at the Spring 2010 Membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information.

It’s tough to find a good match, but that doesn’t stop some from logging onto social networking sites in search of one. We all want to find that special someone who complements our strengths and shares our interests.
That’s why Michael Conlon hopes scientists around the world will someda

Opinion: Africa Grid?

Official ribbon-cutting for “Blue Gene for Africa” last year. This supercomputer is the fastest scientific computer on the African continent, capable of 11.5 teraflops (11.5 trillion floating point operations per second). Image courtesy Center for High-Performance Computing

At the EGEE User Forum in Uppsala, the author, Bruce Becker of the Meraka Institute and coordinator of the South African National Grid, called for making an AfricaGrid a reality. Here he outlines the reasons why now is the opportune time for work on this to be starting in earnest.
For some years now, many have been hinting at an “AfricaGrid.”
In the Mediterranean basin, we have seen many African countries participating directly in EUMedGrid (and more recently EUMedSupport).
In the southern region of Africa, we have seen much activity over the last couple of years that allows to envisage at least a “Sub-Saharan Grid.”
This prospect is very appealing to the r

Announcement - Internet2 Issues Call for 2010 Richard Rose Award Nominees

Internet2 is now accepting nominations for the 2010 Richard Rose Award. The annual award, established in 2009, recognizes outstanding individual efforts aimed at extending the benefits of advanced networking to the broadest education community. The award will be presented at the Internet2 Spring 2010 Member Meeting in Arlington, Virginia to be held 26-28 April 2010. Nominations will be accepted until 15 March 2010.
The Rose Award celebrates educators or technologists who have had a demonstrable impact on the K20 community through the bringing together of diverse communities around common goals and projects, and have accumulated a record of community accomplishments. The award also presents an important opportunity to recognize the achievements of leaders across all educational sectors who are working hard to ensure that students of all ages and locations have access to the most advanced networking resources available.

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