Content about EGEE

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

Feature - Where are they now? Interconnected computers for high performance operations call for strong interoperability. Image courtesy of cordis.europa.eu Updates from the three projects covered in iSGTW’s inaugural issue, 16 November 2006.Building the global gridISGTW led its first issue with a feature on the possibility of and progress toward achieving one seamless global grid.  At the time of writing, basic interoperation between Open Science Grid and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE had been achieved, according to Laurence Field of EGEE. “Scientists using either infrastructure can now submit jobs to both and copy data between the infrastructures,” Field said. “And if another grid interoperates with either, they’ll see the other grid’s resources. Through activities like these we hope to build up a homogenous grid landscape.”Where are they now?Morris Riedel of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, and chair of the Grid Interoperation Now (GIN) group within the Open Grid F

Feature - Geocluster open for business Two-dimensional images can be hard to interpret.Image courtesy of CGGVeritas Last summer, CGGVeritas (Compagnie Générale de Géophysique-Veritas), the first business to develop an industrial application with Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, opened its doors to clients. “Everything is set for our sales team,” says Gaël Youinou, software manager at CGGVeritas. “I expect that the first contracts with clients will be signed before the end of the year.” The company developed software that processes seismic data, which comes from a variety of sources, including trucks that mechanically send sound-waves into the earth with the use of large, hydraulics devices, and ship-borne “airguns” that fire at regular intervals just below the water’s surface as the vessel moves along pre-determined survey lines. Regardless of the source of the sound-waves, or whether they take place on land or sea, the principle is the same: The reflected compression

  Image of the week - Medical Data Manager Doctors in Amsterdam may soon have more time in their busy schedules to spend with their patients.A new way to access and manage patient data—the EGEE-developed Medical Data Manager, or MDM—was installed in June at the Amsterdam Medical Center, Netherlands, in its first deployment for real use. They hope to finish testing by the end of this year, and use the tool in production in 2009. In development since 2003, the MDM allows secure access to images in the DICOM format from grid resources. Standing for Digital Image and COmmunication in Medicine, DICOM is the prevailing world standard for computerized tomography (CT) scans, magnetic resonance images (MRI), positron-emission tomography (PET), X-rays and ultrasound images. MDM has several layers of access to comply with strict privacy requirements.“This tool is expected to be a great boon for the doctors and researchers, ” said Johan Montagnat, computing researcher at CNRS. “They c

Announcement -Call for abstracts: the 4th EGEE user forum Image courtesy of EGEE  EGEE-User Forum2-6 March 2009Catania, Sicily Hosted by INFNCall for abstracts (full text)Template for abstract submissionImportant dates:Abstract submission opening date: 15th of October Deadline for abstract submission: 5th of December Notification of acceptance: 15th of January  The User Forum is an annual key event of the EGEE project. The forum provides an important opportunity for members of the grid community exploiting the technologies developed by EGEE and various collaborating projects, to present their work, discuss grid technology use with colleagues, and learn about advances in middleware and application services.The 4th EGEE User Forum is co-located with OGF25 and OGF-Europe's 2nd international event. This combined event will once again strengthen the links between EGEE and the Open Grid Forum, bringing users and standards bodies together to ensure that the future of the grid is complemented by the establishment of key stand

Feature - Celebrating the development of the LHC grid Wolfgang von Rüden unveils the cermonial globe sculpture, before an audience in CERN's globe-shaped building. Image courtesy of GridFest Last Friday, 3 October, grid-enthusiasts gathered—physically and virtually—from around the world for a special event: to celebrate the success of the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. “After the very successful start of the Large Hadron Collider on 10 September, it is now the turn of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to celebrate the transition from a development and deployment phase into operation,” said Wolfgang von Rüden, head of CERN’s Information Technology department, in his welcome address to the 250 grid enthusiasts gathered in CERN’s ‘globe’ building. “I am very happy to tell you that we are ready to handle the unprecedented flood of data that will be generated by the LHC.”In his address “CERN and LHC: their place in global science” CERN&

Feature - Stateside celebration at the bi-continental LHC Grid Fest Upper left, Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, opens the festivities. Upper right, from l-to-r, Miron Livny, Don Petravick of Fermilab and DOE’s OHEP, Susan Turnbull (half hidden), and Patricia McBride. Bottom, Steve Cotter at the podium, and broadcast images from CERN and other sites. Image courtesy of Reidar Hahn, Fermilab. Three weeks after the US-LHC community celebrated in the wee hours as the first beam circulated in the Large Hadron Collider across the Atlantic, staff and supporters gathered again in Fermilab’s signature high rise.  Via satellite, they co-celebrated the official start-up of the world-wide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) with their colleagues around the U.S. and abroad.As the U.S. Tier-1 site for the CMS experiment, Fermilab has contributed significantly to the grid development for the experiment, and is an important Open Science Grid site, both in terms of resources and expertise. The same is true of Brookhaven National Lab wi

Feature - People behind the LHC Grid: A Bird’s eye view When the LCG first started, the idea of a grid, with its tiered hierarchy, was still new. Image courtesy of Ian Bird  Ian Bird is project leader for the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid, where he is responsible for grid deployment and all of the technical work involved in setting up the grid infrastructure for the LHC. iSGTW: If you were at a cocktail party, and someone asked “What do you do,” how would you answer, in lay person’s terms?IB: Well, I’d try to change the subject. (Laughs)Seriously, I try to coordinate the overall activities of the LCG—the experiments, the service providers, the money and the people. I report to CERN management and oversight, to make sure all the nuts and bolts are in the right place. And, of course, I  think about all the technical aspects.iSGTW: How do things look now?IB: Well, we’re very upbeat. Of course, we always knew that there would be surprises, but we are handling them.&nb

Announcement - EGEE 2008 Business Track Networking at the STFC/EGEE Workshop on Distributed Computing, London, May 2008. Image courtesy of EGEE  Driving Grid Adoption, Fostering IT InnovationEGEE ’08 Business Track22-23 September 2008 Istanbul, TurkeyThe EGEE ’08 Business Track is the third in a successful series of dedicated sessions designed to bring the benefits of grid and related technologies to the attention of businesses that have not yet looked at these for their innovation.The Business Track will connect grid experts, end users and IT innovators to explore new opportunities for the adoption of distributed computing by engaging with EGEE through set processes designed to promote industrial involvement and collaborative developments. “The Business Track offers a prime opportunity to learn from an expert panel of developers and users, showcase success stories and pave the ground for future collaborative developments supported by EGEE’s Business Programme”, says Bob Jones, EGEE Project Direc

  Feature - GRelC @ Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science, founded by working climate scientists—mostly from Columbia University's Lamont-Dohery Earth Observatory— written for the general public. Image courtesy of RealClimate Drowning in data Talk to any climate scientist, and they’ll tell you that one of their biggest problems is dealing with the sheer volume of data they acquire when dealing with something as complex as worldwide climate change. They don’t lack for sources of data; if anything, they have too much to choose from—everything from tree ring data to ice cores to collections of air samples from hot-air balloons. With this in mind, managing the metadata can be a bottleneck. But  distributed, peer-to-peer and grid-enabled solutions can help to provide a secure, decentralized, transparent and scalable solution for managing petabytes of datasets spread among several sites, say researchers at the EuroMediterranean Center f

Grid computing walks the standard line: thinking inside the box With many projects involved, truly seamlesss interoperability can be a challenge.Image courtesy of NorduGrid and Vicky White“Standard” is often equated with “average” or “boring.” How can you innovate or invent when you’re bound by standards and regulations? How can you push the boundaries when you’re stuck inside a box?Yet how can you create something on a grand scale—something that can slot into place with other grand things—unless you create something interoperable. Something . . . standard.In this special feature, former iSGTW editor (and now GridTalk editor) Cristy Burne reports on this easily overlooked aspect of grid computing. Why should we care? Standardizing grids: the current landscape Challenges for the future The way forward A standard in action: GridFTP A “de facto” standard: VOMSBONUS FEATURE: What does the grid community have to say about standards? (See what people from inst

Feature - Health-e-Child Anatomical heart model, with the colored patchesrepresenting heart segments, proposed by the American Heart Association. These divisions allow models to simulate localized abnormalities in diseased hearts, such as the focal thickening of the septum and local fiber disarray in hypertrophied cardiomyopathy. Things that look like ittle hairs represent the orientation of muscle fibers. Image courtesy Health-e-Child. Last year, iSGTW reported on the initial deployment of Health-e-Child, a European project that fits grid technology to pediatric medicine. In this issue we provide an update. New portal, new applicationsHealth-e-Child uses the Gateway, a grid-based platform developed by maat Gknowledge together with other European partners, to store, retrieve and manipulate medical records. One of the most successful applications running on this platform—winning a “Best Live Demo” award from the EGEE User Forum in Clermont-Ferrand, France—is the CaseReasoner applicati