Content about EGEE

Link of the week - DIY grid summer school Happy graduates from the Joint EGEE and SEE-GRID Summer School on Application Support, the teaching material from which is now available.Image courtesy of Gergely SiposMissed out on attending a grid summer school this year? Why not study at home using the teaching material from the Joint EGEE and SEE-GRID Summer School on Application Support, held 25-30 June in Budapest, Hungary, and organized and hosted by MTA SZTAKI, the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.The teaching material includes lectures, slides and notes for the hands-on practicals, originally presented by EGEE, SEE-GRID and ICEAGE representatives. The school aimed to introduce potential users to EGEE and SEE-GRID grid technologies, and to introduce methods for application development on EGEE grid networks. Its primary focus was on ways that end-users can apply gLite middleware to operate large-scale distributed applications on top of inter-organizational grids. Twenty-two people att

Announcement - EGEE ’07 early bird registration extended The perfect place for a grid conference, Budapest itself is divided into a grid, with each of its 23 districts referred to by a roman numeral.Image courtesy of budapest.com EGEE’07 earlybird registration has been extended to July 13 2007. Enabling Grids for E-Science has opened its books to take early bird registrations for EGEE ’07, one of the major international grid events of the year.Register now to be part of what organizers are predicting will be the largest EGEE conference yet. Held in Budapest from 1-5 October 2007, EGEE ’07 is expected to attract more than 600 key players from the international grid community, including users, decision makers, resource providers, developers, governments and businesses. The main theme of the conference this year is communication and building bridges between science and business, users and infrastructures, countries, scientific disciplines and projects.

  Opinion - Grid: goldmine for entrepreneurs? The ability to search through millions of images to locate specific content. Now what would that be worth? And where else to get the computing power for such technology but the grid?Image courtesy of Imense Who still includes access to electricity as a competitive advantage in their business? I don't.In his article ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’, published in the May 2003 edition of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr points out that such days are long gone, and he suggests IT is heading the same way. As the availability of IT increases, and its cost decreases, it will becomes less a strategic advantage, and more an everyday commodity that anyone can buy. The rapid development of virtualisation and distributed computing technologies, including grids, means that the paradigm shift predicted by Nicholas Carr could happen sooner rather than later.But what does this mean for scientists keen to become entrepreneurs? For big businesses, the grid value proposition is rat

Image of the week - Tissue analysis with grids An example of test analysis: left, the input image, a tissue slice from a donor; right, the slice digitized.Image courtesy of Federica Viti, Università degli Studi di GenovaIn the ongoing battle against disease, some researchers are taking standard tissue analysis a step further: a technique known as tissue microarray analysis, or TMA, helps researchers search tiny pieces of tissue for traces of disease. Digitizing these images allows them to be analyzed and shared with the help of computers. Using digitized TMA, researchers can access and analyze many tissues at once, saving time and expense. Although sharing images between institutions certainly increases a researcher’s resources, it can also add to their data burden, and it can also raise concerns about patient privacy.  A team from the Institute for Biomedical Technologies, National Research Council in Milan, Italy, and the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technology, National Research Council in

  Feature - Grid Power in Five Minutes? Harald Kornmayer talks with Cristy Burne at this month's OGF20/EGEE User Forum in Manchester, UK.Image courtesy of Owen Appleton Start the clock. It is 16.23. Harald Kornmayer, spokesperson for the g-Eclipse project, has already drawn a crowd. His promise? Access to the computing power of the Grid in just five minutes.For those juggling the complexity of multiple stand-alone grid-based applications, Kornmayer offers something simple: g-Eclipse—a generic framework that allows users to incorporate many different tools via a standardized, customizable, intuitive interface. “We’re aiming to develop a general middleware-independent framework that can be easily used by all grid users, operators and application developers,” explains Kornmayer. “We’re also providing support for new applications, so new projects can speed up tool development and integration, reducing time-to-market and time-to-service.”The g-Eclipse project is funded by the European C

Statistic of the Week - 318 Stock image from sxc.huFor those new to grid computing, or those who wonder what happened to all the real words, the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE glossary can provide a ready guide to the acronyms and keywords that pop up in almost every grid-related sentence. The glossary defines 318 acronyms. The EGEE project, now in its fourth year, was reviewed by an independent panel nominated by the European Commission at CERN in Switzerland last week. Presumably the reviewers didn’t have too much of a problem sorting their GUIs from their GILDAs: their preliminary comments were very positive. “Anyone involved in EGEE had very high expectations, and we haven’t been disappointed,” said one of the reviewers. “Overall we assessed the project as performing excellently.”Can’t find your personal favorite in the EGEE Glossary? Send an e-mail to [email protected] and do your bit to help demystify grids.. 

  Feature - OGF20 and EGEE 2nd User Forum: Thoughts From a Grid NoviceCristy Burne at OGF20/EGEE User Forum in Manchester, UK.Image courtesy of Sabah SalinA few months ago I thought the grid was something you used to solve a sudoku. Ideally, the majority of grid users need never know any different; the word “grid” will be buried into the services it represents.Currently this is far from the case. The Grid is a work in progress. Its users are its guinea pigs, hopefully its allies, and certainly those who should have most influence on its development. Many thousands of these users are already dependent on grid technology for the everyday running of their projects. We have seen vast improvements in the quality of grid services in the last few years, but there is a long way to go before using the grid becomes as simple as just plugging in.Events such as last week’s joint 20th Open Grid Forum and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE User Forum, held in Manchester, England, are a chance for users to share their grid experie

Feature - LCG-France: Ramping-up for the LHCA recent meeting of LCG-France. Image courtesy of LCG-FranceIn March 2007, more than seventy members of LCG-France gathered together in order to discuss the progress of French involvement in the global grid infrastructure to meet the computing needs of the Large Hadron Collider, CERN’s new particle accelerator, set to go online late this year. This meeting highlighted the challenging aspects of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid and the progress made during the last several months. Many new members have recently joined LCG-France as part of the preparation for the LHC start up. “The required data processing capacity, complexity of the installation and management of the computing—as well as the effort needed to provide and operate a reliable platform for the experiments—have led to an important increase in the staff and in the number of French sites,” says Fairouz Malek, scientific manager for LCG-France.To cope with the large amount of data the LHC will pro

Feature - Cairo Hosts an International Grid SchoolThe Sphinx and one of the pyramids at the Giza plateau, Egypt.Stock image from sxc.huFrom April 17 to April 28, in the shadow of ancient technological marvels, scientists from all over the Mediterranean are working to advance modern computing technology and teach other researchers to do the same. A hotel in downtown Cairo, about five miles from the great pyramids at Giza, is the site of the first EUMEDGRID School on Application Porting (EGSAP-1). “This is the first time we have organized such a large event in this region,” says Federico Ruggieri, EUMEDGRID Project Manager. The 15-day school, which involves researchers from seven Mediterranean countries, aims to port 10 applications before the closing session next Saturday. At the time of publication, nine of the 10 applications had been successfully “ported” or incorporated into grid middleware. And one of the applications already has its Web interface.“This is excellent, much b

Feature - Gridifying Geant4Simulation of the nuclear reaction of a cosmic-ray proton in one of the inertial sensors of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. LISA is a joint ESA-NASA mission for the first space-borne gravitational wave detector. Image courtesy of Geant4 Twice a year a new version of the Geant4 software is released to the research community. Geant4, a software toolkit that simulates the interactions of particles with scientific instruments, is used by high-energy physicists, space scientists, medical physicists and radiation researchers. These simulations can help engineers alter instrument design for optimal performance or teach researchers how to best analyze their data.Before a release, the new version of Geant4 must be carefully tested. Evaluators from the Geant4 development team compare the simulation results of two previous Geant4 versions, looking for significant differences. Since December 2004, these tests have been run at several Worldwide LHC Computing Grid sites using the EGEE infrastructure. Grid comput

Image of the Week - Modeling Underground Waterflow with CODESA-3DCODESA-3D visualization of underground waterflow in the Korba aquifer in Tunisia. Image courtesy of Giuditta Lecca, CRS4, Italy and Domenico Vicinanza, CERN-IT and University of Salerno, Italy CODESA-3D, or COupled DEnsity-dependent variably SAturated flow and miscible transport, is an EUMedGrid application that models water movement in aquifers. This three-dimensional simulator can help hydrologists calculate how much fresh water can be pumped from costal aquifers before risking salt water contamination. EUMedGrid aims to create a grid infrastructure for research in the Mediterranean region.

Feature - Parallel Evolution: DILIGENT and ETICS Parallel evolution: two EU funded projects interacting for mutual benefit. Left, the ETICS interface. Right, watermarking and video curation, two functions of the DILIGENT system. Image courtesy of Owen Appleton DILIGENT and ETICS, two European Commission-funded projects that are leaders in the European Grid scene, recently achieved milestone releases of their software, thanks largely to their collaboration with each other.ETICS—E-infrastructure for Testing Integration and Configuration of Software—offers grid-enabled, automated building and testing of software. Just over a year after the project launched, their final release candidate was made public. The project’s service, however, has been in use for some time by several projects, including DILIGENT—a DIgital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technologies. “We started to use ETICS when it was three months old for our build and deployment testing activities,” explained DILIGENT’s Ped