Content about middleware and services

At the recent Internet2 Global Summit iSGTW sat down with George Komatsoulis to talk about the state of distributed research and the NIH Commons, a scalable virtual environment to provide high-performance computing and data storage for bio-medical research. When implemented, the Commons will create a marketplace for digital bio-medical resources, driving down costs and democratizing access.

iSGTW interviews Jorge Gomes, member of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) executive board, ahead of next month’s EGI Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. He explains why it is vital to support research with grid computing, as well as with a range of related IT services. “In order for researchers to be able to collaborate and share data with one another efficiently, the underlying IT infrastructures need to be in place,” says Gomes. “With the amount of data produced by research collaborations growing rapidly, this support is of paramount importance.”

Next-generation sequencing (NGS), in which millions or billions of DNA nucleotides are sequenced in parallel, is the backbone of novel discoveries in life sciences, anthropology, social sciences, biomedical sciences and plant sciences. Read about the SoyKB and iPlant collaboration that is taking plant sciences to the next level.

Last week, iSGTW was at the EUDAT second conference in Rome, Italy. EUDAT, which is funded under the European Commission's FP7 scheme, seeks to support a collaborative data infrastructure which will allow researchers to share data within and between communities and enable them to carry out their research effectively. 

Last week, the 10^th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting took place, hosted by the European Commission Services with the support of the e-ScienceTalk project. Find out what delegates at the event had to say on the subject of measuring project impact and success.

Plus: Read the highlights of discussions concerning the development of the computational infrastructure of 21st century science.

Thanks to the high-speed GÉANT network and the computing power of the European Grid Infrastructure, researchers in Italy are creating music from electroencephalography data. Listening to these melodies could help researchers forecast impending seizures.

Computer engineers at CERN last week announced that the CERN data center has recorded over 100 petabytes of physics data over the last 20 years.

Last week's SciencePAD workshop, held at CERN, examined ways to ensure scientific software stays citable and sustainable over the long term.

As grid and cloud computing evolve, so too will the security surrounding both. Read about current efforts to make these infrastructures more secure environments for research.

The popular file-sharing tool comes to Europe with a new site aimed at fulfilling the specific needs of EU-based researchers.