Content about EGEE

Announcement - Call for abstracts: EGEE’08, September, Turkey The EGEE’08 program will feature keynotes from world-renowned grid experts and parallel tracks covering a wide spectrum of grid-related topics. EGEE’08 will also demonstrate the benefits of the large-scale production grids for the growing number of scientific communities and business sectors and also look into sustainability aspects of grid technologies.Image courtesy of EGEE Abstracts are invited for consideration for the posters and demo session at the EGEE’08 conference. The conference will be held 22-26 September 2008 in Istanbul, Turkey. Abstracts must be submitted by 20 May 2008. Posters and demonstrations will be on display throughout the conference, with a dedicated session to give authors the opportunity to present their work to a wide audience. Prizes will be awarded for the best poster and the best demonstration, voted for and judged respectively by the attendees and the External Advisory Committee. For this exciting pos

  Feature - Mission: HealthGrid HealthGrid brings together interested parties from across the globe to work towards improved biomedical research through the use of grid technologies. Image courtesy of HealthGrid The HealthGrid initiative began in 2002, created by a scientific community driven to develop health-related grid technology at an international level. In April 2003 this initiative became the HealthGrid association, a community that now includes about 500 people from 30 countries across the globe. The HealthGrid community comprises two main arms: the HealthGrid international association, which promotes the use of grids in the international healthcare and biomedical sectors; and the HealthGrid.US alliance, which represents HealthGrid in the U.S. By working together, it has become easier to share and communicate knowledge and technology, to guarantee effective collaboration between business and collaborative, free and open source models, and to provide trustworthy resources. Together, HealthGrid can ensure the

  Image of the week - The micro-world of muscle cells These four visualizations show four sections of a muscle cell, each comprising several saromeres. Different colours indicate different organelles, including the myofibrillar system, sarcoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria and t-tubules. The cell envelope is rendered transparently.Image courtesy of GeomCell Enter the micro-world of your muscle cells, and you’ll find the entire length of a muscle “fiber” is actually a single cell. Called “skeletal muscle cells,” these giants are comprised of a number of repeating units, called sarcomeres, which contain cellular organelles such as myofibrils, mitochondria, t-tubules and sarcoplasmic reticulum.These organelles, even if of the same type, vary widely in their size, shape and location within the cell. Moreover, they often display complex spatial relationships. To understand the complexity of a muscle cell, realistic computer models are instrumental and may serve as a virtual cell

  Images of the week - CERN Open Day draws tens of thousands The GridCafé provided a friendly spot for visitors to learn about grid technology, discover the history of computing at CERN, take the challenge of grid-themed computer games, explore interactive grid maps, hot coffees, cakes and more.Image courtesy of Anton Topurov GridCafé volunteers answered the big questions for visitors from all over the world, explaining the difference between grid technology and the Internet and sharing the different ways in which grid technology is helping to fast-track scientific research.Image courtesy of Anton Topurov Volunteers showcased emerging technologies including GridMap (CERN openlab/EDS), a visualization that shows the status of different sites in the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. Green indicates the site is “OK,” orange indicates degraded service and red indicates that the site is down.Image courtesy of Anton Topurov The CERN Computer Centre, just prior to

Feature - Never-born proteins: predicting protein structures from your web browser By predicting the structure and functional properties of “never born proteins” scientists can learn more about the structure and function of actual existing proteins.Image courtesy of INFN While the number of known natural protein sequences is quite large, it is infinitely small compared to the number of proteins theoretically possible using the 20 natural amino acids. Thus, there exist a huge number of protein sequences that have never been observed in nature, the so-called “never born proteins.” If we can study the structural and functional properties of these “never born proteins,” we can improve our knowledge of the fundamental properties that make existing protein sequences so unique. Where these studies would take years on a single CPU, grid infrastructures make it feasible to approach this problem in an acceptable time frame. The Rosetta softwareThe Rosetta ab initio module is a software application developed by David Baker at the Univers

  Feature - Powerful pollution model moves to the grid High ozone levels threaten Bulgaria’s most important agricultural crop, wheat, with yields down by ten to twenty percent.Image courtesy Tzvetan Ostromsky In January 2008, Bulgarian authorities installed a public air pollution monitoring system in Sofia, the country’s capital. The system allows passing citizens to check air quality and keeps authorities informed of current pollution levels.  Computer scientist Tzvetan Ostromsky is also keeping an eye on pollution levels. Ostromsky is working at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences to gridify a large-scale air pollution model. Called the Danish Eulerian model, it combines data on convection, diffusion, precipitation, emissions and more to predict future air pollution trends.“For a small country like Bulgaria it’s especially important to know what pollutants we’ll receive and from where,” says Ostromsky. “Emissions can travel thousands of kilometers—most of what Bulgaria get

i  Feature - Our powers combined: gLite, Globus and Unicore play ball The OMII-Europe team will celebrate the close of the project’s first phase in late April by releasing five interoperable software components that will give scientists the ability to combine the middleware powers of gLite, Globus and Unicore. Images courtesy of Sergio Andreozzi Connectivity and sharing lie at the heart of grid technology, yet ironically, the grid world can be a lonely place for a scientist. Researchers are limited to the storage, databases and processing power made available by their own particular grid middleware. This means each grid platform becomes the equivalent of an independent city-state. If you’ve ever felt the need to tunnel under your own city to visit other middleware dominions, then you’ll be interested in some new software that can let you do just that. In late April, OMII-Europe will celebrate the close of its first phase by releasing five interoperable software components that allow grid users to work acros

  Feature - The business of grid computing: “What can grids do for you?” Imense Ltd, of Cambridge, England, use gLite middleware to run their content-based image retrieval technology. This particular result came from a search for “green centre, purple background.”Image courtesy of Imense Ltd EGEE, Europe’s largest grid for a wide range of applications, is working with industry to help new businesses and old to capitalize on the open source grid technologies already developed. Stephanie Parker, who chairs EGEE’s Industry Forum, says grids have a lot to offer. “The biggest selling point is that grids can save you money: companies can access more computing power without shelling out for new hardware. Grid delivers major value by improving business performance, by helping to get products to market faster, and by enabling companies to do new things.”Save money; make money Many companies are working to develop software that enables new technologies for computing grids. An excellent e

  Feature - Evolving towards the future of science: genetic algorithms and grid computing Computer engineers are mimicking biological genetics to create algorithms able to optimize solutions to computing problems. These “genetic algorithms” are possible thanks to the recent advent of cheap, readily available computing power, such as that available from computing grids. Stock image from sxc.hu Great innovations are not rare—we are surrounded by them. For inspiration, look not at buildings and machinery, but at plants and animals. Some of our best synthetic technologies copy what we see in nature: think of seed-styled Velcro, mollusk-inspired epoxy, air conditioning based on termite mounds and solar panels that imitate insect eyes. Now, a relatively new type of biomimicry is helping researchers find great ideas.Mutating the way to perfection  “Genetic algorithms” are search functions that “evolve” towards the optimum solution to a problem. Imitating life’s genetic evolu

  Feature - Computing the unseen: the search for dark matter Researchers are using the Collider Detector at Fermilab detector to help in the search for dark matter, hoping to observe a Bs particle decay, which could provide evidence of supersymmetry and dark matter. Image courtesy of FermilabThink you’ve seen it all? Think again. Everything we can see and detect makes up only four percent of the universe, according to Michael Weinberger, a physicist at Texas A&M University and member of the Collider Detector at Fermilab collaboration. Weinberger and his CDF colleagues are conducting a search that could shed light on the universe’s “dark matter”—material that doesn’t emit or reflect radiation but is predicted by astrophysical observations to outnumber visible matter by nearly six-to-one—and they are using grid technology to expedite their hunt. The elusive Bs decayThe key to the search is the ability to measure the rate at which Bs particles decay to form two muons. According to t

Link of the week -  Global Grid User Support comes of age GGUS provides user support 24 hours a day, seven days a week to users of the EGEE grid across the planet.Stock image from sxc.hu  Providing a system that supports users of computing grids may not sound like the most exciting of challenges, but the team at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe in Germany think otherwise, and is proud of their service: the Global Grid User Support System, or GGUS, pronounced “jee-guss.”“Helpdesk systems that work across a single enterprise are well understood,” explains Torsten Antoni, leader of the GGUS team. “However, the scale of grid computing means that the helpdesk system must work across many enterprises and span administrative domains, which is a very different challenge.” GGUS began in 2004 as an EGEE project designed to make it easy for grid users to find someone to deal with their needs, whether requesting a digital certificate or asking why the proxy server in Outer Mongolia is no

  Feature - National, regional, global, industrial: EU-IndiaGrid takes its place in the grid computing world Groups throughout India are collaborating via EU-IndiaGrid to develop a regional coupled atmosphere-ocean model system for the prediction of the Indian summer monsoon. Images courtesy EU-IndiaGrid Last month, while snow fell on much of Europe and the U.S., things stayed pretty hot in Bangalore, India, where 150 grid experts gathered as part of the EU-IndiaGrid conference, held from 13-14 December in conjunction with e-Science 2007. EU-IndiaGrid, a project supporting the e-science community between Europe and India, provides an infrastructure comprising 1200 core processors and 50 terabytes of disk space, with access to a one gigabit per second link through the Indian Department of Atomic Energy Grid Project. Biology breakthroughsDecember’s conference emphasized recent EU-IndiaGrid successes and the introduction of several new tools for biological simulations, including the use of computer-based surrogate bacteria