Content about EGI

The so-called 'long-tail' of research is an important and often underserved community, compared with other areas of science that are well supported by national supercomputing infrastructure. Cloud computing is making it easier to deliver tailored services to these researchers and is enabling new research collaborations across the globe.

Last month, iSGTW attended the EUDAT Third Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. EUDAT is facilitating efficient research by contributing towards a collaborative data infrastructure in Europe. This will enable researchers to share data easily both within and between communities. It will also facilitate preservation of research data.

"The longer we wait, the more complex it becomes to solve the challenges around building the collaborative data infrastructure," says Kimmo Koski, managing director of Finland’s IT Center for Science (CSC), which is the organization coordinating the EUDAT project. "The time has come to do this now: Today’s global economic situation highlights the need for broad collaboration to solve these challenges."

The latest European Grid Infrastructure case study describes how researchers in The Netherlands have used the e-BioInfra Gateway to analyze brain scans from NATO soldiers deployed to Afghanistan. The team discovered that combat stress impairs cognition by affecting the midbrain and its link with the prefrontal cortex. While this effect was found to be largely reversible, it is thought that it could have an impact on the soldiers’ future social and cognitive functions.

Researchers have used grid computing resources provided by Metacentrum, the Czech national grid infrastructure, to help design toxic-chemical-eating bacteria. The team used a combination of grid-powered mathematical modeling and laboratory experiments to design and test a five-step metabolic pathway for a new bacterium. The predictions of the model were used to create bacterial strains containing the optimal enzyme ratios, and the behavior of these real-life bacteria matched predictions closely. The key is to balance the activity of multiple enzymes to keep the bacterium alive, while sustaining a high processing rate.

Last week, ‘Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud Initiative’ hosted an event at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, to mark the launch of its new cloud-computing marketplace service.

Pirjo-Leena Forsström, director of information infrastructure services at Finland’s IT Center for Science (CSC), will give a keynote speech at next month’s European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) Community Forum in Helsinki, Finland. iSGTW speaks to her ahead of the event to find out more about the work that she and her colleagues have been doing at CSC.

Yannick Legré was recently appointed director of EGI.eu, which coordinates and manages the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). iSGTW speaks to Legré about his vision for the organization, as well as the challenges it faces, ahead of next month’s EGI Community Forum in Helsinki, Finland.

Since being launched in 1977, NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 probes have been on an epic journey to the very edge of our solar system. Now, Domenico Vicinanza has harnessed the power of grid computing to create an uptempo piece of classical music from the data collected by the probes.

Liver fibrosis, a  kind of scarring of the liver's tissue, is usually diagnosed with a biopsy – an invasive surgical procedure to remove liver cells for lab testing. However, physicist Olivier Beuf believes that we can do better and has put together a team to develop an imaging technique that can be used in a clinical examination.

Using the European Grid Infrastructure, he and his team have developed a 3D map showing how fibrosis affects blood flow in a diseased liver. These 3D maps could provide a reliable alternative to the usual biopsy procedure and have the potential to improve patients' well-being, as well as our understanding of liver disease.

A live demo at last week's EGI Technical Forum 2013 showed how to set up cluster deployments for virtual machines.

Last week, iSGTW was at the European Grid Infrastructure Community Forum 2013. Find out what Nancy Rothwell, Peter Coveney, Kostas Glinos, and Steven Newhouse had to say during the opening plenary session. The quartet touch on a range of topics, from the importance of human capital and uniting e-infrastructures, to open access and future funding mechanisms.

Thanks to the high-speed GÉANT network and the computing power of the European Grid Infrastructure, researchers in Italy are creating music from electroencephalography data. Listening to these melodies could help researchers forecast impending seizures.