Content about EGEE

  Opinion - Five years on: the Asia Pacific in the global grid Author Simon Lin at the recent EGEE conference in Budapest Hungary. Image courtesy of TWGrid Around five years ago, we first began to realize that grid middleware and toolkits alone are insufficient to achieve the vision of grid computing. For success, we must focus on deployment, taking advantage of user needs—such as the needs of the high energy physics community and the Large Hadron Collider—to drive a production infrastructure. On 4 October 2002, the Grid Deployment Board of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid held their first meeting in Milano, Italy. The meeting was chaired by Mirco Mazzucato and included 26 participants as well as WLCG project leader Les Robertson, computing coordinators from the four LHC experiments, and numerous country representatives. At this inaugural meeting, this group discussed the goal of providing a common production infrastructure on which to run experimental data challenges: the result was the LCG-1. The collaboration

  Feature - The world’s climate data from a one-stop-shop In the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, data from various models and sources were combined to project the future climate. This image shows Scenario A1B: simulated mean temperature change relative to 1980-1999.Image © DKRZ / IPCC DDCHow can you study something as interconnected as climate without using interconnected models? This was one of the biggest questions facing Kerstin Ronneberger during her early research in earthsystem science modeling.When Ronneberger found an opportunity to get into grid computing, she was immediately interested. “I wanted to study the human influence on climate change,” she explains, “which involved coupling models of biosphere, economy and climate to get a consistent simulation of their dynamic interactions. Without access to grids the relevant data was often hard to obtain and even harder to combine”“In earthsystem science, everyone is using a different system to st

  Feature - The path more travelled by: grids help track human migration Nicolas Ray uses Approximate Bayesian Computation—developed in 2002—to track the migration of humans through the centuries.Images courtesy of Rakesh Rampertab Today, families interested in an intercontinental move will probably go by plane, train or automobile. Several thousand years ago, adventurers had a harder time of it. Thanks to the plucky, pioneering efforts of early families, humans have managed to explore and settle every habitable region of the globe. Surviving the “bottlenecks” Two ancient migrations have particularly affected the shape of future generations: the “Out of Africa” event and the North to South colonization of the Americas. These migrations left traces in our genes still observable today. Described as “bottlenecks”—events where only a few individuals get through—the migrations may have caused a drastic reduction in population size and a corresponding drop

  Images of the week - Scenes from SC07 Pumping at the pinnacle of energy, innovation and computing power, SC07 is serving up the latest and greatest in IT to a record crowd this week in Reno, Nevada.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell The Stony Brook University team are all smiles just prior to beginning their 44-hour race against the clock and five other undergraduate teams as part of the Cluster Challenge.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE stand showcases the achievements of EGEE, a project which brings together partners from 45 countries to create a grid strongly focused on interoperability and accessibility.Image courtesy of Jerry Newton Photography The Fermilab team, members of Open Science Grid, are demonstrating high bandwidth Tier-1 to Tier-2 LHC data transmission. The OSG duck can be found on OSG member stands throughout the exhibition.Image courtesy of John Urish Projects including AstroGrid, OMII, National Grid Service, NaCTeM, the London e-Science Centre and GridPP are highl

  Opinion - Celebrating one year of International Science Grid This Week iSGTW celebrates one year of reporting on grid computing initiatives across the globe. In the last six months, visits to the iSGTW Web site have increased almost six-fold and are continuing to rise. Images courtesy of iSGTWThis issue, International Science Grid This Week celebrates its first anniversary. Since our launch last year, interest in grids, cyberinfrastructure and distributed computing has skyrocketed. As one indicator, visits to the iSGTW.org site have increased almost six-fold over the last six months. The number of scientists using grid computing is also increasing, as is the level of resources now available to them.In the last year, the number of jobs run on the UK’s GridPP has more than doubled to approach one million jobs during October 2007. Altogether, in the last twelve months GridPP computers have run the equivalent of 26 million normalized CPU hours.The Open Science Grid e-infrastructure is now averaging 80,000 jobs a day&md

  Feature - “CIC-On-Duty”: smooth operations behind the scenes Hélène Cordier presents at the Regional Operations Center Managers’ Meeting during EGEE ’07, speaking on developments in “CIC on Duty” operations.Image courtesy of Toth Csilla  As a grid user, you want to send jobs to your grid, and you want results back. Hélène Cordier is one of the hidden coordinators working behind-the-scenes to ensure this happens as smoothly and as often as possible.An integral part of operations in the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, Cordier is deputy of the French Regional Operations Center and also deals with French operations for the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. “CIC-On-Duty” Cordier has been the driving force behind “CIC-On-Duty,” where CIC stands for Core Infrastructure Center. Dubbed COD, Cordier’s scheme helps ensure smooth operation of the EGEE grid. All EGEE federations contribute one COD team of two to three people.&

  Announcement - Call for abstracts: 3rd EGEE User Forum, Clermont-Ferrand, France The Enabling Grids for EsciencE (EGEE) grid infrastructure is now operated by more than 90 partners spanning 45 countries. Image courtesy of EGEE Authors are now invited to submit abstracts for the 3rd EGEE User Forum, to be held in Clermont-Ferrand, France on 11-14 February, 2008.Submitted abstracts should follow online guidelines and be submitted online. The deadline for abstract submission is 3 December 2007.Abstracts should address one of three general themes:scientific results produced with the help of grid technology, with emphasis on how grid technology enhanced the result,functional requirements for application porting and deployment, existing or prospective grid services, explaining the purpose, typical use cases and interactions with other grid services.Tutorials and TrainingsThose interested in organizing a tutorial or meeting in conjunction with the User Forum, should contact the Program and Local Organization Committee chairs. Tu

  Feature - Open Grid Forum maintains focus on the 2010 goal Grids are about scaling IT, and community organizations such as Open Grid Forum are essential to guiding and managing this growth process, says John Ehrig, Open Grid Forum enterprise and marketing program manager.Images courtesy of Open Grid Forum Now involving more than 300 organizations from 50 countries, the Open Grid Forum community has gathered at this week's OGF21 to continue progress towards grids standards development. Open Grid Forum Enterprise and Marketing Program Manager, John Ehrig, explains the goals and progress of this community-initiated not-for-profit organization.Driven by accelerating globalization, organizations and individuals are being challenged to work in new ways—often across departments, disciplines and large geographical areas. Technology silos that inhibit the flow of information, innovation and commerce are being broken apart and rebuilt to better serve this new business paradigm. Grid and grid-like technologies—including

  Feature - EGEE ’07 stresses opportunities for cooperation, commercialization and continued innovation “In five years 80 percent of all scientific papers in all areas will be made in virtual laboratories. Fifty percent of social science documents will go the same way in five to ten years.” Ulf Dahlsten stressed the invaluable role of cyberinfrastructure in science.Images courtesy of Toth Csilla   This week’s EGEE ’07 conference is being held in the wake of a record-breaking quarter for the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE consortium, which has supported 100,000 jobs a day for the last three months using a grid infrastructure spanning 41,000 CPUs. Collaborators from 45 countries worked to achieve these results, combining the resources of 250 computing centers to create the EGEE grid. This kind of cooperation is the key to EGEE’s continued success, according to many of the conference’s plenary speakers.  “We cannot be good at everything,” said Ilona Vass, vice-president

  Announcement - EGEE ’07 women’s networking lunch The global distribution of EGEE members as at the end of the fourth quarter of EGEE-II, July-September 2007. Males are represented in yellow; females in blue.Image courtesy of EGEE As part of EGEE ’07 , held in Budapest, Hungary, next week, the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project will hold a women’s networking lunch on Thursday 4 October at 12:30pm. The lunch is an opportunity for women in science and in the grid community to network with other women. Places are limited so lunch will be on a first come first served basis. Attendees should follow signs from the main restaurant. For more information please contact the organizers. This event is being held as part of the EGEE Gender Action Plan, reflecting a commitment to reducing the gender gap in the scientific workplace. Other initiatives include the adoption of best practices and equal opportunity policies for EGEE and collaborating projects. EGEE ’07 begins on Monday; registration is ava

Announcement - Grids and e-Science course: 24-28 September, Santander, Spain The port city of Santander is on the north coast of Spain.Image courtesy of Maria Victoria Gomez Fernandez Registration is now open for Grids and e-Science 2007, a course organized by the Spanish National Research Council and held from 24-28 September at Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Santander, Spain.The course program gives an overview of the current status of grid infrastructure and covers morning presentations and afternoon practical sessions. Monday and Tuesday’s programs deal with the use and deployment of e-infrastructures based on gLite and will cover an Enabling Grids for E-sciencE tutorial as well as developments related to Globus Toolkit 4. There will be speakers from IFCA, Rediris, Barcelona Supercomputer Center and University Complutense of Madrid. Wednesday will cover middleware with a focus on the problems of resource allocation, monitoring and general broking and scheduling on the grid. University of Barcelona develo

  Feature - ViroLab: a grid-based decision support system for HIV infections According to UNAIDS reports, 38.6 million people were living with HIV/AIDS in 2005, up from 36.2 million in 2003.Image courtesy of ViroLab Medical doctors and researchers have more information at their fingertips than ever before. They can now study diseases from the DNA level all the way up to medical responses, thanks to the increasing availability of genetic information, extensive patient records, and large, high quality clinical and pharmacological databases.  To coordinate this wealth of information medical doctors and researchers must have integrative technology that bridges existing gaps in multi-scale models, data fusion and cross-disciplinary collaboration. It is here that distributed computing—and grid technology in particular—can play a crucial role in helping researchers to understand the processes involved in new biomedical e-science, from bioinformatics to heath informatics.Virtualized tools; personalized treatment Vi