Content about EGEE

Feature: Worldwide Grids, Worldwide ScienceSan Francisco hosted the 2007 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Scientists at last week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco discussed the use of grid technologies and volunteer computing to fight disease, predict earthquake effects and hazardous weather conditions, understand the origins of the universe, and decode our own behavior.“Science is distributed because life is distributed,” said TeraGrid Director Charlie Catlett in one of three sessions devoted to grid computing. “The Internet is worldwide, people are putting computers and storage facilities on the Net. The question is not whether you want a distributed infrastructure, but whether you want to use that infrastructure to do science.”During the grid-focused sessions attendees learned about the global growth of distributed computing infrastructures and their use by scientists around the world.    &nbs

Feature: Kids Enjoy GridsA student asks a question during the “Grids for Kids” day.   Image courtesy of EGEE.  “I want to come back and work here when I’m older,” was the spontaneous reaction of one of the children invited by the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project for a “Grids for Kids” day at the end of January this year. The children, aged nine to eleven, came to EGEE headquarters at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, as part of their computing class. The EGEE Gender Action team organized the day to introduce children to grid technology at an early age and to encourage the participation of females in science. All of the presenters were women, but the school group included both boys and girls. Where are your white coats? “Before this visit the children thought that scientists always wore white coats and worked in sterile labs concocting potions, were usually male, and had wild Einstein-like hair,” said Jackie Beaver, the class’s teacher at the Insti

Feature: Grid Contests Draw Participants from Three Continents Winners of the PlugtestsTM from the University of Tokyo, pictured with several members of the jury. More than 200 grid researchers, users and industry representatives came together November 27–December 1 at the GRIDS@Work event in Sophia Antiopolis, France. The highlight of the event was the 3rd Plugtests™ contest, in which ten teams from Europe, Asia and South America competed to solve two computational problems in the least amount of time using a specially constructed grid. In the first contest, teams had one hour to run an application to solve the FlowShop problem, one of the hardest challenge problems in combinatorial optimization. Solving the problem required the teams’ applications to find a schedule of a set of jobs on a set of machines that minimizes the total execution time. The second contest required participating teams to solve the N-Queens problem: h

Feature: Government to grid Aleksandar Belic (left) with EC Commissioner for Science & Research Janez Potočnik (center) during a visit to the Belgrade Institute of Physics. It is well known that countries like the UK and Germany have invested heavily in grid technology, but they are not alone. Countries in South Eastern Europe have also enthusiastically embraced grid technologies. Aleksandar Belic, head of the Scientific Computing Laboratory at the Institute of Physics in Belgrade, has been one of the leaders in bringing grid infrastructures to the region. Unusually for a scientist, Belic has governmental experience that has proved invaluable in his work with projects such as Enabling Grids for E-sciencE. “I spent three years as Assistant Minister of Science for Serbia, working on international collaborations,” says Belic. “I was very proud to have helped to pave the way for Serbian participation in the

Feature: Digital Libraries Go Dynamic
Sites of the DILIGENT Pre Production Service, including gLite sites (green) and DILIGENT Hosting Node Managers (yellow).
Image courtesy DILIGENT
WhatÂ’s digital, can manage any information you might have, but doesnÂ’t exist until you ask for it? Digital libraries, according to Pasquale Pagano from the Digital Library Infrastructure on Grid Enabled Technologies project.
“DILIGENT wants to go beyond static digital libraries to provide an infrastructure to create and manage dynamic, virtual digital libraries using grid technology,” explains Pagano, the project’s technical director.
A prototype system for creating such dynamic digital libraries has been achieved by deploying the DILIGENT tools and services on top of a basic grid infrastructure layer. The infrastructure comprises sites from DILIGENT and from the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE projectÂ’s Pre-Production Service.
"DILIGEN

Feature: Building the Global Grid Map of grid sites worldwide from projects participating in the Open Grid Forum's Grid Interoperation Now Group. (Image Courtesy GridPP Interoperability. It’s a big word for an even bigger task: getting the world’s dozens of grid computing projects to operate as one seamless global Grid. Over the past decade, many different grid projects, serving different communities, with their own approaches to grid technologies, have sprung up around the world. Scientists needing to access resources – computing power, data storage, scientific instruments – associated with different grids find the task difficult, if not impossible.“Our goal is to produce grid infrastructures and software that facilitates collaboration for science,” says Laurence Field from the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project. “To create a uniform environment for scientists, we have to break down all the administrative do