Content about GridPP

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.

Feature - Get it all with GridGuide Click on the map above for an interactive guide.  Image courtesy of GridGuide Want to know what science is on the grid, who the scientists are and where they work? Help is at hand with a new website launched today. GridGuide is an innovative introduction to the sites — and sights — that contribute to global grid computing, a technology that connects computers from around the world to create a powerful, shared resource for tackling complex scientific problems. The launch of GridGuide comes as part of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) User Forum.While still a work-in-progress, the GridGuide website already allows visitors to explore an interactive map of the world, visiting a sample of the thousands of scientific institutes involved in grid computing projects. Sites from 23 countries already appear on the GridGuide, offering insider snippets on everything from research goals and grid projects to the best place to eat lunch and the pros and cons of their jobs. GridG

  Link of the week - Old friends and new: iSGTW, GridCafé, GridTalk and more The GridTalk project harnesses the successes of existing grid communication projects International Science Grid This Week and GridCafé, creating a central hub for European grid communications. GridTalk will also tackle new missions dedicated to deciphering grid policy and showcasing the human face of grid computing.Images courtesy of GridTalk A new editorial team...A big welcome to Dan Drollette and Anne Heavey, who will be producing all-new editions of iSGTW as of next week. Dan comes from a strong background in science journalism and Anne has been an iSGTW contributing editor since our launch. Both are keen to hear your grid-related news and announcements so please drop them a line anytime.A new partner and project...And welcome to EU project GridTalk. Co-funded by the European Commission, GridTalk was launched last week and aims to create a unified and cohesive approach to European grid communications. The projec

  Opinion - Celebrating one year of International Science Grid This Week iSGTW celebrates one year of reporting on grid computing initiatives across the globe. In the last six months, visits to the iSGTW Web site have increased almost six-fold and are continuing to rise. Images courtesy of iSGTWThis issue, International Science Grid This Week celebrates its first anniversary. Since our launch last year, interest in grids, cyberinfrastructure and distributed computing has skyrocketed. As one indicator, visits to the iSGTW.org site have increased almost six-fold over the last six months. The number of scientists using grid computing is also increasing, as is the level of resources now available to them.In the last year, the number of jobs run on the UK’s GridPP has more than doubled to approach one million jobs during October 2007. Altogether, in the last twelve months GridPP computers have run the equivalent of 26 million normalized CPU hours.The Open Science Grid e-infrastructure is now averaging 80,000 jobs a day&md

  Feature - EGEE ’07 stresses opportunities for cooperation, commercialization and continued innovation “In five years 80 percent of all scientific papers in all areas will be made in virtual laboratories. Fifty percent of social science documents will go the same way in five to ten years.” Ulf Dahlsten stressed the invaluable role of cyberinfrastructure in science.Images courtesy of Toth Csilla   This week’s EGEE ’07 conference is being held in the wake of a record-breaking quarter for the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE consortium, which has supported 100,000 jobs a day for the last three months using a grid infrastructure spanning 41,000 CPUs. Collaborators from 45 countries worked to achieve these results, combining the resources of 250 computing centers to create the EGEE grid. This kind of cooperation is the key to EGEE’s continued success, according to many of the conference’s plenary speakers.  “We cannot be good at everything,” said Ilona Vass, vice-president

  Feature - Coming ready or not: will we be ready for the LHC? The GridPP team are assessing the readiness of clusters across the UK, including this cluster at Birmingham University, part of SouthGrid.Image courtesy of GridPP With the Large Hadron Collider starting up next year, grid sites worldwide are ramping up their equipment and service levels in preparation for an expected flood of data. But, will they be ready—and can any problems they’re having be fixed in time? GridPP tests its readinessIn the UK, a team from GridPP, the UK particle physics grid, has recently completed a round of visits to 17 GridPP sites, aiming to assess how ready they are for the onslaught of data that will mark the beginning of the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Dave Britton, GridPP’s Project Manager, coordinated the process. “We wanted to check that each site would be ready for next year, and find out how we could help with any difficulties. The best way to do this was to visit each site individually, so we could tal

  Opinion - Grid: goldmine for entrepreneurs? The ability to search through millions of images to locate specific content. Now what would that be worth? And where else to get the computing power for such technology but the grid?Image courtesy of Imense Who still includes access to electricity as a competitive advantage in their business? I don't.In his article ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’, published in the May 2003 edition of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr points out that such days are long gone, and he suggests IT is heading the same way. As the availability of IT increases, and its cost decreases, it will becomes less a strategic advantage, and more an everyday commodity that anyone can buy. The rapid development of virtualisation and distributed computing technologies, including grids, means that the paradigm shift predicted by Nicholas Carr could happen sooner rather than later.But what does this mean for scientists keen to become entrepreneurs? For big businesses, the grid value proposition is rat

Feature - GridPP: the UK grid for particle physics Simulated event of the collision of two protons in the ATLAS particle physics experiment.Image copyright CERNParticle physicists in the United Kingdom have built the country’s largest grid as part of the GridPP project. Developed to analyze data from the upcoming Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the grid currently spans 17 UK sites and includes almost 10,000 CPUs and more than 500 terabytes of data storage, with available storage reserves on disk and tape of 1.5 petabytes. It is also an integral part of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project, contributing most of the computing power for the UK and Ireland regions.GridPP is a collaboration of all the UK universities with particle physics departments. It also includes Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in Oxfordshire, which acts as the UK Tier-1 center for LHC computing. Steve Lloyd, GridPP’s chairman from Queen Mary, University of London, explains the structure: “Apart from the Tier-1, the GridPP sites are joined into

Feature - Ensuring a Grid Without Boundaries The EUGridPMA members at the CCLRC Coseners House in Abingdon, England.Image courtesy of PPARC.  With more than 30 national Grids in Europe alone, the European Policy Management Authority for Grid Authentication must ensure that electronic identities will work across any boundaries. At last month’s meeting, its first ever held in the UK, the growing EUGridPMA considered bids for accreditation from Europe and Africa.“I was very pleased to welcome the EUGridPMA to the UK for the first time, especially as the PMA expanded its horizons,” said David Kelsey of CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and GridPP in the UK. “We are now closer to enabling access to the grid to all scientists wherever they are located.”Kelsey was an original organizer of efforts to build international trust among grids. EUGridPMA is one of three regional PMA’s within the International Grid Trust Federation. IGTF establishes requirements and best practices for identity manageme

Feature: Studying grid society Social scientists are using grids for their research without ever submitting a job. They study grid technologies and grid communities, and how both develop and interact with each other. “I think it’s interesting to elicit the social elements behind technologies like the grid, and to make sense of technologies in social settings,” says one such social scientist, Will Venters from the London School of Economics. Grid computing is interesting to social scientists because it’s an emerging technology and has a large, diverse group of researchers involved in its creation. Venters is beginning a project to study how scientists developing a grid and those who will become its users influence each other. Claus Jacobs, from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, is nearing the end of a project that studied the dynamics between grid technologies and communities, and how members of the grid community organize