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Content about EGEE

January 12, 2011

Incorrect border as shown on Google Earth.  
December 8, 2010

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

October 20, 2010

Image of the Week - e-Science at the Globe

Image courtesy e-Science Talk

Do you want to know what e-science and e-infrastructures can do for your research?
If so, an important event about e-science is happening at the CERN Globe on Thursday 4th November 2010: the 8th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting. This event, organized by e-Science Talk, will gather key figures in the e-infrastructures' community and discuss the evolving distributed computing landscape. The aim of the two-day event is to talk about the long-term sustainability of e-infrastructure scientific research in Europe.
Keep your schedules free for Thursday 4th and Friday 5th November 2010: watch the event live on the upcoming webcast and join the online discussions to have your say.
More information to follow shortly so keep your eyes on the web.

July 28, 2010

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

June 2, 2010

Profile: EGI’s director, Steven Newhouse

The new director of the organization that will coordinate Europe’s grid infrastructure, at the gala EGEE User Forum dinner in Uppsala, Sweden. Image courtesy Corentin Chevalier, GridTalk

Steven Newhouse was recently appointed director of EGI.eu, a new, long-term organization tasked with coordinating the European Grid Infrastructure. Headquartered in Amsterdam, it will support Europe’s National Grid Initiatives as they operate the infrastructure which was built by the projects DataGrid, EGEE-I, -II and -III. He will leave his post at CERN as EGEE technical director to head EGI.eu (and the EGI-InSPIRE project). Former iSGTW editor Danielle Venton sat down with him to ask a few questions.
iSGTW: How would you describe EGI.eu?
Newhouse: EGI.eu is a group of people dedicated to working with colleagues in National Grid Infrastructure across Europe, and making those resources available to a diverse set of user communities across t

May 26, 2010

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

May 5, 2010

Feature - From EGEE to EGI: Plain talk with Bob Jones and Steven Newhouse At the Uppsala Gala Dinner, Bob Jones of EGEE handed over to Steven Newhouse of EGI his most prized possession — a crown made from all the name tags he collected from conferences in the past six years. Image courtesy GridTalk After six years, on 1 May, EGEE will hand over responsibility for the world’s largest grid infrastructure to a new organization dedicated to its coordination and development (EGI.eu), and its newly elected director, Steven Newhouse. During its lifetime, EGEE — Enabling Grids for E-SciencE — assembled a world-wide infrastructure of CPU cores, hosted by computing centers around the world. Each month, about 13 million jobs are executed on the EGEE Grid. This massive multi-disciplinary production infrastructure was led until now by Bob Jones who initially, like Steven, held the position of technical director at EGEE, and quickly advanced to project director. Du

April 28, 2010

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

April 28, 2010

Opinion: What would Linnaeus do?

Carl Linnaeus on his wedding day, holding in his right hand a specimen of Linnear borealis — his favorite plant, said Magnus Lidén, curator of the Uppsala University Botanic Garden. Image courtesy Uppsala University Art Collection

Elizabeth Leake of TeraGrid — the high-performance, distributed computing network in the USA — was a guest at the EGEE User Forum, the recent conference in Europe on high-throughput computing. Here, she gives her impressions about a technology challenge faced by both types of computing: Long-term, persistent storage.
 
One of the highlights of visiting the conference venue in Uppsala, Sweden, was learning about Carl Linnaeus.
Born in nearby Råshult in 1707, Linnaeus  moved to the college town of Uppsala to study, and quickly became a cornerstone of the university. He died in 1778 and was laid to rest in Uppsala Cathedral — largest in all of Scandinavia.
Linnaeus was fam

April 21, 2010

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

April 21, 2010

EGEE User Forum Highlights Created with flickr slideshow. Images of EGEE User Conference in Uppsala, Swede. All images were taken by Corentin Chevalier of GridTalk For those of you who were not able to attend the EGEE User Forum in Uppsala, Sweden, here's a few highlights courtesy of the many people who contributed photographs for the use of iSGTW. Here, you can get a sense of everything -- although admittedly not get the experience of such Swedish institutions as cookies and caviar (from a toothpaste tube) for breakfast, served at the Akademi hostel at the University of Uppsala. —Dan Drollette, iSGTW

April 21, 2010

 

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.)
 
 
 

April 14, 2010

Feature - Mean Shift Smoothie interprets medical images 66 times faster

One of the very first X-rays, taken by William Röentgen in 1896, and showing his wife’s hand. What is the dark blob on one finger?* Image courtesy Wikipedia
*Answer at very bottom of this article.

As any lay-person who has ever looked at an X-ray knows, it can be very difficult to tell what you are looking at, let alone differentiate what is healthy from what is diseased or damaged or otherwise not normal human tissue. (See image at right.)Pity the poor medical expert, then, who must deal with not only two-dimensional images but also interpret information from three-dimensions, such as is the case with magnetic resonance imaging or computer-aided tomography, to name just two imaging modes. These multidimensional data bring additional information, but are also much more difficult to process and interpret.But with advanced algorithms such as clustering, the really useful informatio

April 7, 2010

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).

March 24, 2010

Feature - Q&A: Grid Colombia warms up

A group photo at an Open Science Grid-sponsored Grid Colombia workshop, which took place in October 2009. Image courtesy of Open Science Grid.

With a little help from colleagues at Open Science Grid and EGEE (via EELA-2), Colombia is on the cusp of launching its first national grid infrastructure. iSGTW caught up with Jose Caballero to learn more about the present and future of this promising project. Caballero currently does software development for ATLAS, and serves as the OSG liaison to South America. Previously, he spent five years working with the gLite grid software for the CMS experiment.
iSGTW: How did Grid Colombia get started?
Caballero: EELA-2 (E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America) chose Colombia to host one of its main conferences in 2008, and that brought the worldwide grid movement to the attention of both academia and government in Colombia. After that, universities started to study the creation of a national

February 10, 2010

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

December 16, 2009

Link of the week: GridCast at e-Science Oxford 2009

Attendees chat at the GridPP booth. Photo courtesy of Neason O'Neill, GridPP.

Last week saw computational scientists, technologists and researchers congregate at the Kassam Stadium, Oxford for the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2009 and the 5th IEEE International Conference on e-Science.
The conference was an opportunity for participants to share, discuss and advance the exciting research that has grown out of the e-Science programme as well as to highlight related activities from around the world.
Conversation and debate at the conference were lively but for those who missed out, the week's events were discussed and documented over at the GridCast blog.
Posts ranged from discussions on user engagement, classical art databases and, of course, the rainy British weather. As one of the key conference themes, there were many examples of e-science for the humanities, with the opening talk of the week given by Helen Bailey of the e-Dance p

December 9, 2009

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

December 9, 2009

Biology group issues challenge to computing

The O6-methylguanine DNA methyltransferase protein from Vibrio parahaemolyticus. This protein methylates DNA and is associated with DNA repair. Vibrio is a bacterium in the family that causes cholera. Image courtesy eNMR.

The famous Chicago architect Louis Sullivan — arguably the founder of the modern skyscraper — once said that “Form follows function.”
And what is true of architecture is true of chemistry and structural biology as well: a molecule’s function — how it behaves, and what it causes to be produced — can be deduced by its form. Knowing a molecule’s precise, three-dimensional geometry tells researcheers how and where it will bind to some other molecule, and what effects the two combined molecules will have when they are united.
Or, as Timothy Lovell, a computational chemist at a pharmaceutical company, summed it up: “Once you have the structure down on p

November 25, 2009

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

November 18, 2009

Acronym of the Week: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

How do you spell Recommended External Software for EGEE CommuniTies? Image of Aretha Franklin courtesy art.com

Over the last year, the number of packages in the RESPECT program has nearly doubled. RESPECT (Recommended External Software for EGEE CommuniTies) publicizes software packages that work well with gLite middleware.
Why is this useful? It allows users to do more with the grid (providing additional functionality), helps users avoid “reinventing the wheel” by providing tools — schedulers or workflow mangers for example — that work for many situations, and it helps users port new applications to the grid faster.
Are you using RESPECT? The full list of RESPECT packages can be found on the EGEE Web site.
—Danielle Venton, EGEE

November 18, 2009

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

October 14, 2009

Feature - A new test bed for future cyberinfrastructure

Image courtesy of jaylopez at stock.xchng.

Grid, cluster, and cloud developers will have somewhere new to test their software before letting it loose on the world, thanks to a new initiative called FutureGrid.
“I think people found that it was pretty hard to test early grid software on the machines that were available, because the machines that were available didn’t like being experimented on,” said Geoffrey Fox, principle investigator for FutureGrid. “FutureGrid is trying to support the development of new applications and new system software, which are both rapidly changing.”
The FutureGrid collaboration, which will be headquartered at Indiana University, had its first all-hands meeting 2-3 October.
“We will have early users throughout the first year,” said Fox. A small number of users are already signed up, but there remains room for more on the FutureGrid roster.
“We would like

September 16, 2009

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

September 16, 2009

Newsflash - Fall conference line-up

At the EGEE conference in Barcelona, attendees can take sessions on ‘Grids, new media and video’ and ‘From abstract to international news story.’ Image courtesy stock.xchng

The fall conference season will take iSGTW readers to the shores of the Mediterranean in Barcelona, the heights of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in Banff, and the banks of the Columbia River in Portland. Read on to find out more about some of the booths and workshops you’ll find at each conference!
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE ’0921-25 September, Barcelona, Spain
Next week (21-25 September), the bulk of the European grid community will gather in Barcelona for the final conference of Europe’s flagship computing grid project, EGEE.
“With the transition from EGEE to the new European Grid Initiative at the forefront of everyone's minds, this final EGEE conference will be the perfect time for members of the grid community to promote their wo