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February 28, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Worldwide Grids, Worldwide Science

Feature: Worldwide Grids, Worldwide ScienceSan Francisco hosted the 2007 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Scientists at last week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco discussed the use of grid technologies and volunteer computing to fight disease, predict earthquake effects and hazardous weather conditions, understand the origins of the universe, and decode our own behavior.“Science is distributed because life is distributed,” said TeraGrid Director Charlie Catlett in one of three sessions devoted to grid computing. “The Internet is worldwide, people are putting computers and storage facilities on the Net. The question is not whether you want a distributed infrastructure, but whether you want to use that infrastructure to do science.”During the grid-focused sessions attendees learned about the global growth of distributed computing infrastructures and their use by scientists around the world.    &nbs

February 21, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Ensuring a Grid Without Boundaries

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

February 14, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Kids Enjoy Grids

Feature: Kids Enjoy GridsA student asks a question during the “Grids for Kids” day.   Image courtesy of EGEE.  “I want to come back and work here when I’m older,” was the spontaneous reaction of one of the children invited by the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project for a “Grids for Kids” day at the end of January this year. The children, aged nine to eleven, came to EGEE headquarters at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, as part of their computing class. The EGEE Gender Action team organized the day to introduce children to grid technology at an early age and to encourage the participation of females in science. All of the presenters were women, but the school group included both boys and girls. Where are your white coats? “Before this visit the children thought that scientists always wore white coats and worked in sterile labs concocting potions, were usually male, and had wild Einstein-like hair,” said Jackie Beaver, the class’s teacher at the Insti

February 7, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Preparing for the LHC

Feature: Preparing for the Large Hadron Collider Close to 300 members of the WLCG collaboration attended a recent workshop at CERN. Those in attendence represented 27 countries and 86 sites.Image courtesy of Will Venters.  Processing data for the Large Hadron Collider, the next-generation particle accelerator under construction at CERN, Switzerland, is one of the driving forces for development of grid technology. The task of processing the 15 petabytes of data the LHC is predicted to generate each year falls to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid Collaboration, which recently met at CERN for a week-long workshop in preparation for the start-up of the LHC later this year.“WLCG doesn’t have its own grid,” explained WLCG’s Jamie Shiers. “It uses grids from several different projects. We use two major grid infrastructures: EGEE in Europe, and OSG in the United States, as well as many individual research centers. Th

January 24, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Grid Contests Draw Participants from Three Continents

Feature: Grid Contests Draw Participants from Three Continents Winners of the PlugtestsTM from the University of Tokyo, pictured with several members of the jury. More than 200 grid researchers, users and industry representatives came together November 27–December 1 at the GRIDS@Work event in Sophia Antiopolis, France. The highlight of the event was the 3rd Plugtests™ contest, in which ten teams from Europe, Asia and South America competed to solve two computational problems in the least amount of time using a specially constructed grid. In the first contest, teams had one hour to run an application to solve the FlowShop problem, one of the hardest challenge problems in combinatorial optimization. Solving the problem required the teams’ applications to find a schedule of a set of jobs on a set of machines that minimizes the total execution time. The second contest required participating teams to solve the N-Queens problem: h

January 17, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Live Crunching in Switzerland

Feature: Live Crunching in Switzerland Grids are complex and intangible systems, and demonstrating them to a wide audience can be difficult. The recent GridCrunch event rose to the challenge, giving a practical demonstration of grid computing to members of the business and research community at an event in Fribourg, Switzerland. At GridCrunch, held December 7 at the Ecole d’Ingenieurs de Fribourg, approximately 50 people watched a live demonstration of the same distributed application running on two very different computing infrastructures.“I was very impressed by the event,” said EGEE’s head of communications, Hannelore Hammerle. “They were really able to show how easy the grid was to use. It was also good to see the work of the Swiss Grid Initiative, a recently formed national grid initiative that represents Switzerland in the European and global grid communities.”The GridCrunch day, supported by the CoreGrid and EGEE projects

December 13, 2006
iSGTW Feature - Beyond Science: Grids for the Media at IST 2006

Feature: Beyond Science: Grids for the Media at IST 2006

European Commissioner Viviane Reding speaking at the plenary session of IST 2006.
Image Courtesy europa.eu.int

Media convergence could seem a concept distant from the scientists and IT specialists working on the grid, but it may provide the next application area for grid technology. Broadcasting and the media industry share the need to generate, preserve and manage huge quantities of digital content, which could be facilitated by distributed systems such as grids. These ideas were recently explored at the IST 2006 conference held in Helsinki, Finland, through a session hosted by BELIEF, the Bringing eLectronic Infrastructures to Expanding Frontiers project.“Several case studies have helped us understand current forms of convergence, like television and mobile,” said Stephen Benians, BELIEF coordinator. “Other presentations have brought to the fore new domains, such

November 22, 2006
iSGTW Feature - Conferences and Events

Feature: Grids at SC'06

From sparkling cars to free iPods, SC‘06 in Tampa, Florida was far from your average technical conference. With over 250 exhibitors, 48 miles of cable, hundreds of technical and educational programs, workshops, and tutorials, there was plenty to entertain the more than 7,000 attendees gathered from around the globe to witness a fascinating demonstration of high performance computing and grid technology.

This yearÂ’s conference took inspiration from Albert Einstein who said, "Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination." Such power was clearly demonstrated in the numerous examples of grid technologies present at the conference. Ray Kurzweil, famed inventor, specifically acknowledged their influence in his keynote speech, where he highlighted the importance of grid communities in the fight against modern dis