Content about EGEE

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

Image of the Week - What the Planck Telescope found

A new view of the Milky Way. (Click on image to enlarge.) Image courtesy European Space Agency

Last summer, iSGTW did a story on the launch of the European Space Agency’s Planck Telescope into orbit. (See Countdown! World’s most sophisticated thermometer blasts off into space). Their goal was to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos.After six months of collecting data and assembling a map, the 700-million euro observatory created the first full-sky image. It shows what is visible beyond Earth, on instruments sensitive to light at wavelengths much longer than human beings can see.In the foreground are large segments of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The bright horizontal line running the full width of the picture is the galactic plane, in which the sun and Earth reside. Above and below the galactic plane are streamers of cold dust, thousands of light-years long.“It's a spectacular picture; it’s

Feature - New result could shed light on the existence of the Universe

The DZero collaboration has found evidence for a new effect which could explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of nature. CP violations, such as this effect, are in disagreement with the predictions of the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of particles and their interactions. The effect ultimately may help to explain why the universe is filled with matter while antimatter disappeared shortly after the Big Bang. Image courtesy of the DZero collaboration. 

The Big Bang should have created a universe with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. Instead, we only see antiparticles when they are produced in nuclear reactions, cosmic rays, and particle colliders.
The dominance of matter that we observe in the universe is possible only if there is ‘CP violation’ – differences in the behavior of particles and antiparticles. Although physicists first observed certain forms of CP vio

Q&A: Peer-reviewed physics, at the speed of light

Sergio Bertolucci during an interview with a member of the Swedish press. Image courtesy Corentin Chevalier, GridTalk

Sergio Bertolucci is the director for research and computing at CERN. Over the noise of nearby cathedral bells chiming the hour, iSGTW caught up with him on the steps of the University Building in Uppsala during a coffee break at the EGEE User Forum. We asked him about the spate of new papers coming out from the LHC, and what it all means for science.iSGTW: We have heard that a lot of papers have already been published in the time since the start-up of the LHC. Is that right?Bertolucci: Four papers on high-energy physics have already published, and 15 are in preparation as of today, April 14, all based on the collisions that just happened.One week after the first collisions, the first papers were published electronically. And these were all peer-reviewed.
 
iSGTW: That’s very fast, compared to the some

The rise of autonomic computing

The instrumented oil field, seen above, can be thought of as a “cyberecosytem,” in which feedback loops are use to optimize oil extraction. Image courtesy Manish Parashar

How do you maximize the amount of oil you can extract from an oil field? One way is to use the Instrumented Oil Field, or IOF, an application coordinated by the Center for Subsurface Modeling at the University of Texas and used by a consortium of academic and industry researchers. It uses a network of sensors embedded underground to monitor the state of the reservoir while the oil is being extracted.The IOF calculates deposits of oil which can be safely extracted and economically viable, while classifying other parts that cannot be reached as “bypassed oil.” However, if the model relies purely on fixed initial conditions, up to 60% can be inaccurately deemed unreachable.One way around this problem is to use autonomic computing, whose goal is to build systems a

Link of the Week: EGEE Screencasts on grid computing

Just in time for the User Forum at Uppsala, the Direct User Support group  produced some educational screencasts that answer common questions about the grid. They are available for viewing here on YouTube and at Vimeo.
Alternatively, you can download them directly to your laptop.
A few samples are
[1] Introduction to Grid Computing[2] Credential management[3] Job submission[4] Data management(An index of such “Use Cases” can be found here.)
 
 
 

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).

Playstation goes from games to grid

Playstation: more than just fighting aliens on distant planets. (Click to enlarge.) Scene from Halo 3 courtesy of wallpaperez.net

Now, a Sony PlayStation 3 doesn’t just let you pretend to be the Beatles in ‘Rock Band’ or fight in alien ring-worlds in ‘Halo.’
The PS3 is the latest piece of hardware to get on the grid. A mini-cluster of PS3s in Ireland is running software which can screen for new and potentially life-saving drugs.  
Eamonn Kenny, portability coordinator for the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, and Peter Lavin, a grad student at Trinity College Dublin, have ported the EGEE-supported gLite middleware, specifically the worker node software (performing the majority of the computational work on the Grid) to eight connected PlayStation 3’s.
gLite, the middleware which connects 13,000 researchers world-wide to the computing resources of the EGEE grid, is mostly run from multi-core processors

Announcement - EGEE User Forum abstracts deadline extended

It’s not too late to submit an abstract for the 5th EGEE User Forum, thanks to the new extended deadline of 14 December 2009.
Abstracts on the following general topics are welcome:

Planned or on-going scientific work and results obtained using distributed computing technologies,
Data-intensive and data-oriented distributed applications,
Experiences from application porting and deployment of existing software in distributed computing environments,
Software services exploiting and/or extending grid middleware (gLite, ARC, UNICORE etc),
Programming environments,
End-user environments, scientific gateways and portal technologies,
Emerging technologies within the European distributed computing infrastructures (cloud, virtualization etc), National and international activities and collaborations for share and exploitation of e-Infrastructures,
Support services and tools for user communities.

Abstracts can be submitted at

Feature - The long view: A conversation with John Wood

John Wood, speaking at the EGEE 09 conference in Barcelona. Image courtesy EGEE 09

John Wood is one of the key people behind ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), the organization charged with creating a “roadmap” that identifies the key infrastructure needs of researchers for the next 10- to 20- years. The roughly 44 projects that ESFRI singled out are typically pan-European; they require funding from many countries to build and operate; and require cyberinfrastructure to provide access to their data for their global user communities. The projects cover all types of subject matter, from studies of language use to greenhouse-gas monitoring, and typically require research infrastructures that can handle truly vast amounts of date. (For example, the astronomy project known as the Square Kilometer Array will transport over 5,000 times the total IP traffic of the entire AT&T US backbone.)At EGEE 09

Feature - Women in IT: Lebanon

Image courtesy Claire Devereux.

Claire Devereux, who works on the EGEE, GridPP, and NGS grid computing projects at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, travelled to Lebanon in September as part of a British Council Exchange Program to promote women in information technology. During her trip, she spent five days in Beirut and three days touring the country’s industry, meeting women in high-profile positions: ministers, entrepreneurs, university researchers and professors. This was followed by a two-day networking event. Representatives from seven countries from the Near East and North Africa were involved.Devereux: “The idea was to get women in the IT industry together, to establish networks and discuss best practices for enabling more women to enter the field and to stay in careers once they get there. We were able to talk about normal enabling practices in the UK: flexi-time, part-time working, on-site child care, etc. Both the UK

Feature - EGI, from the interim director’s view

Image courtesy EGI

The European Grid Initiative, or EGI, will be one of the focal points at the EGEE’09 conference in Barcelona. In the time since EGI was announced and the plans detailed in last September’s GridBriefing, it has appointed an interim director in July, Steven Newhouse, who has found the time to speak to iSGTW.What is EGI?Newhouse: EGI stands for the European Grid Initiative. It’s a project that wil be submitted to the European Commission (EC) for funding in November. It builds on the work of the EGI-Design Study project, which looked to the grid community to identify the best models for providing a sustainable, long-term grid infrastructure to support different scientific communities within Europe.What is the main aim of EGI?Newhouse: The aim is to coordinate a production-quality grid infrastructure for European researchers. When grids first started up, people were s