Content about EU

Last week, iSGTW attended the EGI Conference 2015 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Open science was a major theme at the event, with both the European Science Cloud and EGI's vision for the Open Science Commons featuring as major topics of discussion.

The GÉANT TIC (Trust and Identity Committee) and Internet2 TIER (Trust and Identity for Education and Research) initiatives met at a workshop in Zurich, Switzerland, on 3-4 February to discuss the status and future of US-EU collaboration on trust and identity technology, policy, and federation efforts.

Only 18% of people living in the EU today have never used the internet, according to a recent Eurostat survey of people aged 16-74. Roughly two-thirds of respondents reported using the internet almost every day and over half say they used the internet while away from home or work last year.

Across Japan, universities and government departments are accelerating their research into cloud computing for academic use. Their research aims to enable improved sharing of cloud-computing resources between universities and to share know-how on the development, operation, and management of cloud-computing systems for further research.

Professor Stephan Roche of the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Spain is one of the early adopters of high-performance computing in Europe’s Graphene Flagship initiative. His latest project has received 22 million core hours from PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. 

Roche has fifteen years of experience in developing novel algorithms and computational approaches that can be used to investigate quantum transporting in complex materials such as graphene. Here, we speak to him about his experience of working with PRACE.

Next week’s Cloudscape VI event will feature a presentation on e-Science Central, a cloud-based platform for data analysis developed by researchers at Newcastle University, UK. Stephanie Parker speaks to two members of the e-Science Central team to find out more about both the platform and a new collaborative project they’re working on called EU Brazil Cloud Connect.

Keith Cover of VU University Medical Centre explains how the computing power of the grid has been used to process thousands of MRI scans from patients with Alzheimer’s, opening the way to better evaluation of biomarkers for this disease in the future.

Cover and his team used open-source software to run analyses of brain imaging scans, in order to track volume changes caused by Alzheimer’s disease. Now the power of the grid has been used to test the accuracy of several software packages on a massive scale.

It may be named after a dying star, but the Helix Nebula project is very much alive. Now half way through its pilot phase, the project is moving ahead with new organizations coming on board.

Last week, funders, policy makers, e-infrastructure providers, researchers, and industry leaders met in Brussels for the 2012 SciTech Europe conference. Robert Winston, one of the speakers at the event, warned of the inherent difficulty of predicting 'the next big thing' in science and technology.