The School for Grid Application Porting is now accepting applications from students with experience in shell programming.

The event, which is sponsored by the South African National Grid, EGEE II, and GILDA, will take place 15-26 March 2010 in Johannesburg. It will be hosted by University of Johannesburg and University of Witwatersrand.

In scientific research, collaboration, resource sharing, advanced computing facilities and data are enabling the acceleration of discovery, innovation, and efficiency more than ever. The grid computing paradigm is a crucial aspect of today's e-Science, and national infrastructures have been deployed worldwide, with a strong emphasis on usability, interoperability and collaboration. However, development and support of the user communities is just as crucial as that of the infrastructure itself.

This school aims at bringing new research groups to use the SAGrid services, so as to increase the number and diversity of application domains and scientific communities supported by the SAGrid e-Infrastructure. While the course is aimed at porting new applications to run natively on the SAGrid infrastructure, beginners who would like to have a first contact with the grid are also strongly encouraged to attend.

The training programme will include lectures, as well as practical hands-on tutorial sessions, and dedicated application development sessions. Fields of research including, but not limited to:

• computer science and informatics
• physics and astronomy
• life sciences and biomedical informatics
• engineering
• chemistry
• geomatics and earth observation
• human languages
• humanities

Visit the grid school website for more information, or to register, visit the applicant questionnaire.