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Link of the week - Fly GridCast to the EGEE user forum and OGF25 in Sicily Image courtesy of Andre-Pierre Olivier Can’t make it to Catania this March?Let GridCast take you there – virtually.Bloggers are providing a sneak-peek behind the scenes of the 4th EGEE User Forum/ OGF25 & OGF-Europe's 2nd International Event, to be held the first week of March in Catania, Sicily.The User Forum is an annual, multi-faceted, key event in the grid community, featuring keynote talks delivered by high-profile experts from business, government and research.The bloggers will be part of a grid podcast, or “GridCast,” that allows readers to virtually share in the forum, as if they were really within view of Mount Etna.Coordinated by the GridTalk project, the GridCast includes podcast interviews as well as a blog, and is being produced live at the User Forum — an event which attracts hundreds of participants."Podcasting is another example of how connected and flexible our world is becoming," says Craig L

Link of the week - Gridipedia: the European grid marketplace Image courtesy of gridipedia.eu What is Gridipedia?Gridipedia is a knowledge and toolset repository that consists of grid service components and best practices to support European businesses with the uptake of grid technologies. The Gridipedia website is currently seeing large growth and is populated with real grid applications from the BEinGRID project, focused on specific business processes and addressing current customer needs and requirements. It is now seen as public source of information on application of grid technologies in a business context.According to Santi Ristol, Services Area Manager at Atos Origin, “Gridipedia is the European grid meeting point of the future – a repository for business case studies and best practice guides where grid players can find solutions and partners.”Gridipedia differs from other grid repositoriesGridipedia currently holds a wealth of business-oriented information based on the insights of two specialist teams&mdas

Quotes of the week - “We will wield technology’s wonders . . .” Steven Chu, Energy Secretary Image courtesy of doe.gov As U.S. president Obama was sworn into office on 20 January, he offered encouraging words to the scientific community:"We'll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost.  We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories." American scientists celebrated both at home and abroad as they listened to their new president highlight the importance of science and technology to our future. "There was applause in the CERN cafeteria," said Elizabeth Clements of Fermilab, at CERN on a visit.Two days later, Steven Chu, the new Energy Secretary, addressed the national laboratories. Chu identified energy as the defining issue of our time, and said that he had accepted the position largely to address environmental issues such as climate change and finding altern

Science is awesome, dude "Year of the nerd." Image courtesy of The Boston Phoenix A positive review of physics appeared in a rather unlikely source — the popular, young, hipster, downtown, alternative weekly known as The Boston Phoenix, which we picked up while on the "T," outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. Big Science even made the cover: "Year of the Nerd: Obama! Tina Fey! Tampa Bay Rays! Hadron Collider! Twitter! 2008 was the year we totally geeked out." Amidst the sometimes colorful language, the authors showed they really got the message about the need for basic research on fundamental questions: "When people discussed the LHC, they scarcely mentioned all of the cool **** (expletive deleted) it can do — how it could recreate the conditions extant around the time of the so-called Big Bang, or how it could unlock the secrets of gravity. Most people probably didn't even know about half of that stuff. They just heard 'it could kill us all' and then freaked t

Link of the Week - Symmetry Breaking Image courtesy of Symmetry So, what do people think of the future of grids, in the advent of clouds? One place to find out is Symmetry Breaking, a blog on the site of the bi-monthly Symmetry magazine website, which is run by the folks at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.  Among other things, it has a continuing, ongoing conversation about the topic, with links to stories about grids in high-energy physics, the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, along with the take of Ignacio Martín Llorente of the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group in Madrid, who argues argues that the two technologies are not at odds with each other — they’re just different and complementary approaches.For more, see the Symmetry Breaking site.

Award of the week - Health-e-Child wins Exhibit Grand Prize at ICT 2008 From left: Jerôme Revillard, David Manset, both of MAAT Gknolwedge, and Antii Peltomäki, Deputy director of DG-INFSO at the European Commission. Image courtesy of ICT 2008 Health-e-Child has won the ICT 2008 Exhibit Grand Prize worth €10,000. ICT is the largest European conference of the year on Information and Communication Technologies, and was held in Lyon, France last week, 25-27 November.Health-e-Child is a European distributed computing project that fits grid technology to pediatric medicine. It connects hospitals and participating institutions—allowing them to share integrated, multi-level information. Runners up to Health-e-Child at ICT 2008 include HoloVizio in second place and u-2010 in third. Congratulations to all the winners! Read more.iSGTW reported on Health-e-Child in May 2007, Health-e-Child prepares for deployment, and again this past May, Health-e-Child: one year on.   

Link of the week - Straight from the horse’s mouth: GridCast from Austin Image courtesy of David Wallom An exhibitor’s eye view “My posts on this blog will try to give an exhibitor’s eye view of the conference, so I have my camera with me and will keep my Flickr updated with pictures from the floor (tagged Supercomputing08) ... I'll also be twittering and using the the #SC08 tag so keep an eye on that too for musings from me and others,” blogs GridTalk's Neasan O'Neill, of  GridPP and EGEE.To bring you more perspectives are David Wallom, technical manager of the Oxford e-Research Centre and technical director of the UK National Grid Service. Claire Devereux who manages the UK & Ireland regional consortium in the EGEE and NGS projects and is also involved in grid computing outreach and dissemination activities.Tim Rupp who works with the Computer Security Team at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois where he spends most of his time on the technical implementation of the lab’s

Link of the week - We'll always have Paris: ESFRI meets grid Research Infrastructures are at the core of the knowledge triangle. From Hervé Pero′s presentation Utilizing the full potential of research infrastructures for strengthening the European Research Area (ERA). Image courtesy of H Pero Less intimate than Ilsa and Rick, close to 100 participants attended a Reflection Group (e-IRG) workshop in Paris on 21-22 October to discuss management of massive data sets, access for users to these data sets, and access to computing resources. Projects from ESFRI, the European strategy forum on research infrastructures, representing many scientific disciplines, are important potential grid users. This was the first event where the ESFRI and cyberinfrastructure (CI) worlds came together.  ESFRI, formed in 2002 at the behest of the European Council, works to strengthen the scientific integration of Europe and its international outreach.  ESFRI facilitates policy-making on research infrastructures, the faciliti

Link of the Week - Science Direct You can now search on-line through 180 years of back issues of publications such as The Lancet. Image courtesy of Science Direct Looking for an abstract of a journal?Wondering about an article-in-press?Want to take a gander at the first peer-reviewed journal, published in 1665?Then take a look at Science Direct.Started in 1999, this is one of the world's largest providers of scientific, technical and medical literature, with access to more than 2,500 scientific, technical and medical peer-reviewed journals.It has tens of millions of abstracts, nearly 9 million full-text scientific articles, a search engine and accesss to abstracts.What we found most intriguing was its "Articles in Press," which allows early access to manuscripts that have been peer reviewed and accepted for publication. Check it out!

Link of the Week - LHC Inauguration Day Specially commissioned by CERN for the ceremony to inaugurate the Large Hadron Collider, ORIGINS is a 20-minute adaptation of the original, one-hour, multimedia production LIFE: A Journey Through Time, featuring Frans Lanting’s photographs and Philip Glass’s music, choreographed by Alexander V. NicholsImage courtesy of LHC Fest Imagine that in a few days (the 21st of October, to be exact), you are hosting the formal, invitation-only, LHC Inauguration, in front of several notables, 11 heads of state, and VIPs from many nations.What, exactly, do you serve your honored guests, and how do you entertain them? For one thing, you give them ice cream cooled by liquid nitrogen. It's all part of the philosophy of  “Molecular Cooking,” which chef Ettore Bocchia said consists of foodstuffs pushed to similar extremes, in order to keep everything at its absolute, flavorful best.All accompanied by music composed for the occasion by Philip Glass, and performed by the Orchest

Link of the week - How the Large Hadron Collider might change the web LHC computing grid resourcesImage courtesy of CERN “When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)” begins smashing protons together this fall inside its 17-mile (27-kilometer) circumference underground particle racetrack near Geneva, Switzerland, it will usher in a new era not only of physics but also of computing.” Scientific American writer Mark Anderson discusses how the “tsunami of raw data” expected from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will put the Globus middleware through a “trial by fire”. If project scientists can tame massive, worldwide fields of networked data and computing cycles in particle physics, he asks, might their solutions apply across the Internet—in much the same way that Berners-Lee's specialized HTML invention morphed into the very backbone of modern technological society? Read more.  

Link of the Week - What's goin' on . . .  QuarkNet students at Fermilab decided to take the idea of the pajama party literally. Image courtesy of Anne Heavey. We all know about the event at CERN, but what else is happening to mark this event? That is where LHC First Beam Events comes in. It has information about what several U.S. institutions, involved in the construction and startup of the LHC, are doing. Probably the most entertaining is the First Beam Pajama Party, held in Illinois at Fermilab's Remote Operations Center, where it was around 2:00 am Central Standard Time at the moment of the first beam in Geneva, Switzerland. The sign in Fermilab's Wilson Hall said “Breakfast will be served," and compared "supersymmetry pajamas" to "dark energy pajamas," among other things.  For more on events at sister laboratories in New York, San Francisco, Arizona, Oregon and elsewhere—click here.Added 11 September: Read a report from the Fermilab pajama party.