News

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has recently signed agreements with two Resource Infrastructure Providers (Ukraine’s UNG and South Africa’s SAGrid) and one coordination project (e.inventory). These collaborations expand the geographical extent of the e-infrastructure, making more resources available to the community.

The Memoradum of Understanding (MoU) with the Ukraine National Grid (UNG) was signed by Steven Newhouse, director of EGI.eu, and Genady Zinovjev on behalf of the UNG community.

The UNG is a grid infrastructure, which includes the computer resources of the institutes of 30 national institutes and universities. Its main task is to develop the distributed computing and grid technologies necessary to advance computational calculations of fundamental and applied science. The UNG also links Ukrainian scientists in various major international grid projects.

The agreement will pave the way for the integration of the UNG in EGI and the deployment in Ukraine of central services in accordance with the EGI standards. This will benefit the Ukrainian fast-growing user community.

The agreement between EGI and SAGrid was signed at the Technical Forum in Lyon, by the Meraka Institute, a member of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. The MoU aims to bring SAGrid into the EGI community but also to let them gain from the expertise of EGI’s other members. The collaboration was announced in the Autumn issue of the EGI newsletter.

Just before the New Year, on the 23rd of December, EGI signed an MoU with the e.inventory project, represented by Jorge Sanchez.

The e.nventory project is working towards the formation of the European e-Infrastructures Observatory, a single-entry-point, one-stop-shop, on-line data warehouse, possessing intuitive, interactive and user-friendly visualisations that allow for a multidimensional and polymorphic panorama for progress monitoring, analysis and dissemination of e-infrastructures achievements to stakeholders and to the public-at-large.

“It is my strong belief that the European e-Infrastructures Observatory can actively contribute to EGI activities by leveraging and disseminating the respective grid developments at National and Pan-European level,” said Jorge Sanchez. “I regard this collaboration to be of added-value for both projects and we very much look forward to a mutually beneficial, long-term partnership.”

The UK's National Grid Service will be hosting a short online seminar series at the beginning of February highlighting the recent developments in the UK for accessing and managing grid resources.

The NGS will be hosting a short online seminar series at the beginning of February highlighting the recent developments in the UK for accessing and managing grid resources. The seminars are aimed at interested parties from the grid community and further afield who are interested in access management. The seminars will be broadcast online on Wednesday mornings at 10.30am (GMT) and will last for 30mins with an opportunity for questions. They will also be recorded and be available after the event.

1st February - Shibboleth Access to Resources on the NGS – Mike Jones, NGS, University of Manchester

This talk will demonstrate how it is possible to access and use NGS resources using institutional login credentials (via the UK Access Management Federation).
It will describe how the UK's two main e-Science authentication systems are combined to form an easy to use yet robust identity management environment. It will discuss how this mechanism links together with system, project and Virtual Organisation (VO) registration procedures.

8th February - Certificate Management in the UK - John Kewley, NGS, STFC Daresbury

The NGS helpdesk receives many tickets relating to certificates (and certificate renewal in particular): largely due to browser incompatibilities. In order to tackle this problem, the NGS has devised CertWizard which is a browser-independent certificate tool.
The presentation will give an introduction to the UK e-Science CA, which has issued over 30,000 certificates, and its associated software and interfaces, including CertWizard.
It will show how modernisations are being made at various stages of the certificate lifecycle, making it easier than ever for users to manage their e-Science Certificate.

15th February - Moonshot - next generation federated identity - Josh Howlett, JANET

Federated identity yields significant benefits for users and services by increasing the usability of services, reducing identity management costs and improving regulatory compliance. A number of different technical strategies for federating identity have emerged during the past decade, with differing levels of success. These technologies address different types of use case, resulting in significant complexity for both users, services and trust infrastructure providers.

This complexity impedes the adoption of services and increasing operational costs. Moreover, there are many use cases where these technologies do not provide a solution.
Project Moonshot is an ambitious Janet-led initiative, building on existing deployed technologies, that aim to develop a single unified and standardised approach that satisfies all of the authentication and authorisation requirements of the education & research community. Much of the technology has now been implemented, and is now being tested within the Janet Moonshot Technology Pilot.

This presentation will provide an overview of some of the motivating use cases for Moonshot and an overview of the technology and the implementation.

How to take part

To join the seminar please use EVO which requires free registration. We recommend that you do this at least a day in advance of the seminar. To join the seminar please go to http://bitly.com/EVOUrbis which will take you directly to the seminar room.

The seminar will also be available through Access Grid. Using the Access Grid toolkit join the "VRVS - Urbis" Virtual Venue. If you are using IOCOM you'll find this Venue in the UK shared Venues drop-down list.

If you have any questions regarding the seminar please contact the NGS helpdesk.
 

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) on 24 January. The MoU formalises the long-term relationship between EGI and the High Energy Physics Virtual Research Community.

The agreement was signed by Steven Newhouse on behalf of the EGI federation, and Ian Bird, head of the LHC Computing Grid project.

The WLCG is a global collaboration that links grid infrastructures and computer centres worldwide, set up to distribute, store and analyse the data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN. WLCG is a mature research community, both in its own right and in its use of grid technology.

“The WLCG is a core user community for all of us working in the European Grid Infrastructure. For the last ten years we have collaborated very closely together to build and operate the infrastructure that we have today" says Steven Newhouse. “This MoU solidifies our current relationship and provides a framework for managing change as our infrastructure evolves to support other researchers regardless of discipline or location.”

The MoU represents a new step in the relationship between EGI and its largest user community, aimed at building a collaboration that will bring significant benefits to the High Energy Physics scientific community.

“This agreement with EGI is very important to the long-term sustainability of WLCG and the services we are providing to the High Energy Physics community,” says Ian Bird. “This collaboration will ensure that both continue to exploit the expertise and resources available for the benefit of all researchers."

The joint work plan outlined in the agreement focuses on strengthening user support activities, harmonising common policies and procedures, gathering requirements and integrating operational activities.
 

The Collaborations Workshop gets researchers and software developers working together to solve research problems. If you’re a researcher who wants to make more of software, or a developer who wants to work with researchers, the workshop is the perfect opportunity to meet new collaborators.

The Collaborations Workshop will be held on 21-22 March at Queen’s College, Oxford. Registration is now open and more information is available on the Collaborations Workshop website.

Meet with researchers and software developers

A fresh perspective can help solve problems or come up with new ideas. The workshop brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines, and software developers with experience of working for the research community. It is this variety of backgrounds that makes the workshop productive. To see who’s attending, visit the website.

You control the agenda

The workshop is split into a series of discussion sessions. As a delegate, you can nominate topics for discussion: anything from a problem specific to your research, to an issue that affects the entire research community. We will then discuss the topic and try to find solutions.

To see the discussion topics that have been suggested so far, visit the website.

Everything is flexible

Everything about the workshop is flexible. Delegates control what they talk about. If someone wants time to present results, time will be found. If more time is needed for a discussion, it will be added (agenda).

Everything is open

Information on the planning of the workshop, the agenda items, the presentations, the reporting-back sessions, and post-workshop progress will all be available on the CW12 website.

For more information, visit the Collaborations Workshop website or send us an email (info@software.ac.uk).
 

The SCI-BUS (Scientific gateway Based User Support) project is looking for six subcontractors. The subcontractors are expected to bring in new user communities preferably with an application area and segment of community which is not yet covered by any project consortium member. The task of subcontractors will be to develop their application-specific gateways and to contribute to the dissemination of the SCI-BUS technology through their user communities.

SCI-BUS aims to create a toolset to provide seamless access to major computing, data and networking infrastructures and services in Europe including clusters, supercomputers, grids, desktop grids, academic and commercial clouds.

SCI-BUS will create 11 application-specific customised gateways and to provide services for user communities including astrophysics, seismology, helio-physics, bio-science, computational chemistry, biomedical communities, PireGrid SMEs community, Blender community, citizens'web-2 community, DCI application developer community or business process modelling community.

We are looking for organisations whose communities need a science gateway to access DCI resources in a convenient and transparent way, that are willing to work with the widely used Liferay based WS-PGRADE/gUSE portal that enables customisation to the needs of each community. Specifically, the goals of bringing subcontractors into the project are:

• To support communities not covered by the current consortium
• To validate the ASM (Application Specific Module) API and the customization methodology
• To get more feedback from user communities
• To increase the number of customized gateways
• To increase the number of portlets in the Portlet Repository
• To increase the number of applications in the Application Repository
• To increase the overall impact of the project

SCI-BUS offers a financial contribution of 20.000 €. Successful applicants will be invited to join the SCI-BUS project as subcontractors, following the rules laid out by the European Commission for subcontracts in Seventh Framework projects.

This call is open both to academic organisations that we expect to represent a wide user community (preferably within the EU and ICPC countries), and to industrial organisations that we expect to be part of a broad user community that includes at least several user companies.

Please, feel free to contact the SCI-BUS consortium at any time. Our goal is to select the best possible candidates and hence we will help you filling in the application form.

The application form and template will be made available on the web and it can be submitted before 29th February, 2012. We kindly ask all applicants to fill out the template thoroughly.

Deadlines

• Submission deadline: February 29, 2012
• Subcontractors selected: March 25, 2012
• Contracts signed, including a development and deployment plan: June 5, 2012

More information

• SCI-BUS subcontractor information and application pack

The voting phase of the EGI mascot competition has begun.

We’re looking for a mascot to represent EGI and we organised a competition to pool ideas from the community. Over the past few weeks we received a good number of entries with some excellent suggestions.

Now you can vote on your favourite for the People’s Choice prize. Go to poll!

You can pick from (Facebook album):

• Ecgo, an octopus
• ALCATRAZ, a northern gannet
• The HUB
• Flopsy, a rabbit
• Colin, a sheep
• Edgar Egi, a sophisticated man
• Pegi, a peafowl
• Egi@nt, an ant
• InGRID, a spider
• Susy Bee, a bee
• [unnamed], a flame

The winners will be announced on 15th February.
 

The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) is calling for papers for ERCIM News special issue on Big Data. The deadline for contributions is Thursday, 9 February 2012.

ERCIM’s goal is to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase co-operation with European industry.

Their next special issue on Big Data aims to report the most recent European research activities and projects focus on building systems to support effective and efficient data-intensive multidisciplinary research.

The editors welcome submissions of short articles (700-800 words) covering both fundamental and practical research results on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Data Modeling (new data models, domain-purpose metadata, data provenance, data context, data quality, data uncertainty)
• Scientific Data Management
• Data Tools (massive data mining, data analysis, data visualization)
• Data Infrastructural Services (data/service discovery, data linking, data sharing, data integration, data harmonization, data fusion, scientific workflow management, data citation)

All submitted articles will be subject to a review process.

More information

• Call for contributions - ERCIM News website

Last call to submit your contribution to this year’s HealthGrid conference and IWSG-Life (International Workshop on Science Gateways for Life Sciences). The deadline for submission is 16 January 2012.

The HealthGrid conference welcomes applications for talks in the form of full or short papers with original, unpublished work; proposals for tutorials that enable new users to employ a specific healthgrid application or system; and demonstration session that will showcase innovative prototypes or production platforms relevant to the conference topics.

The IWSG-Life conference is looking for researchers to present their work in one of three formats: 20-minute talks, 10-minute lightning talks, and demonstrations. Full papers of no more than ten pages are required in application for the 20-minute talks; abstracts are accepted for the lightning talks or demonstration sessions.

Both conferences are co-organised as a joint event in association with EGI.eu, to take place at the Amsterdam Medical Centre in The Netherlands from 21 to 25 May 2012.

• View the HealthGrid 2012 submission details
• View the IWSG-Life 2012 submission details

Have you found our mascot? You only have a few days left to tell us about it!

EGI’s Mascot Competition is looking for a characterful ambassador to represent the European Grid Infrastructure. Don’t miss your chance to win all these prizes (photo) and more, including a touch screen tablet computer. Make sure your entry reaches us before the deadline of 31 December at 23:59 CET. If you are bursting with ideas, you can even enter more than once, as long as each entry is sent separately.

There are two prizes to be won – the Grand Winner and the People’s Choice. Go to our mascot competition page for full details and instructions on how to submit your entry. Good luck!
 

Online registration is open for the International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2012 which will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei, from 26 February to 2 March 2012, with co-located events and workshops. The conference is hosted by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC), Taipei, Taiwan. To enjoy the early bird discount rate, please register before 13 January 2012. The final registration deadline is 22 February 2012.

‘Convergence, Collaboration, Innovation’ is the theme of ISGC 2012. The last decade has seen the wide-scale emergence of e-infrastructure as a critical asset for the modern e-scientist. The emergence of large-scale research infrastructures and instruments that has produced a torrent of electronic data is forcing a generational change in the scientific process and the mechanisms used to analyse the resulting data deluge. No longer can the processing of these vast amounts of data and production of relevant scientific results be undertaken by a single scientist. Virtual Research Communities that span organisations around the world, through an integrated digital infrastructure that connects the trust and administrative domains of multiple resource providers, have become critical in supporting these analyses.

ISGC 2012 will be the 10th meeting that over the last decade has tracked the convergence, collaboration and innovation of individual researchers across the Asia Pacific region to a coherent community and as a result has helped drive the growth of regional e-science activities and its collaborations around the world.

• Register for ISGC 2012
• For more symposium information and detailed topic description, please visit the conference website

How grid computing allows for a better management of coastal resources.

The Aveiro Lagoon in Portugal is a national treasure. With a length of about 45km and separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a sandy dune barrier, this shallow lagoon is one of Europe’s last pristine coastal marshes and a haven for many bird species. The Ria de Aveiro, as it is known locally, is also an important source of revenue in the region, fuelling not only the tourism and aquaculture industries but also artisan fishing and the collection of fleur de sel, a prized variety of salt.
In the past few years the lagoon (technically a half-delta) has been threatened by a decrease in water quality due to industrial, urban and agricultural effluents, but thanks to the Ria’s economic, ecologic and cultural importance, there is a strong push to preserve its ecosystem. The key to long-term sustainability is efficient management and to achieve that, decision-makers need to have a solid understanding of this environment.

Marta Rodrigues and Anabela Oliveira, together with colleagues from National Laboratory for Civil Engineering, Portugal (LNEC), applied a three-dimensional computational model called ECO-SELFE to the Aveiro Lagoon scenario. ECO-SELFE is a fully-coupled ecological-hydrodynamic model. This means that it has modules that determine physical variables (e.g. currents, water temperature or salinity) alongside others for biochemical processes (e.g. carbon, nitrogen cycles) and even ecological relationships at the base of the food chain (e.g. plankton mortality or availability of prey). The idea was to determine how the different ecological input parameters are interconnected and which ones are the most likely to affect the model results and the health of the lake.

Continue reading...

Building on the success of the first European Globus Community Forum (EGCF) in 2011, the Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE) is hosting its second forum meeting on March 26, 2012 at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching near Munich, Germany. The event will be co-located with the European Grid Infrastructure Community Forum (EGICF 2012).

The EGCF annual event provides a unique opportunity for European Globus users to introduce and discuss their work, challenges, solutions and best practices within a community atmosphere. The event also gives participants the opportunity to provide feedback on Globus technologies, as well as present any Globus requirements they may have for their research. Co-organised with the US Globus team, the Forum allows your voice to be heard both within the European community as well as the Globus team in the United States.

What’s new at the Forum meeting in 2012:

• Unique opportunity to present and discuss Globus requirements with IGE and the Globus US team - make sure your requirements are heard!
• Keynote by Globus US project lead, with insider news from Globus US team leader on important upcoming Storage and Collaboration features (hear it here first!)
• Hands-on workshops and Q&A led by Globus experts
• Community stories by researchers using Globus
• Constitution of the 2012 EGCF Council and election of its speaker

Admission is free, and registration for the event is now open. Please take also note of the Call for Participation.

A major survey to understand the cost of European academic computing services was launched today. It is run by the e-FISCAL project, which is funded by the European Commission to estimate the cost of ‘e-Infrastructure’ computing services such as High Throughput and High Performance computing. These costs must be understood so that e-Infrastructures can show their value to the European research community and the benefits they bring over competing technologies. 

“The e-FISCAL project is contributing to a more accurate understanding of the costs of computing services,” said Dr. Per Öster, chair of the Council for the European Grid Infrastructure. “With this information we can make more accurate plans for the growth, development and sustainability of these infrastructures.”

The past decade has seen significant investments in High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Throughput or Grid Computing (HTC) by the European Commission and member states. These form a major part of the ‘e-Infrastructure,’ which supports European research in science, technology and the humanities. However, their costs are not easy to understand, as they are funded by a mixture of European, National, regional and subject-based funding.

The emergence of new commercial technologies such as Cloud computing, which can tackle similar problems to HTC, makes it important for Europe to clearly understand the costs of the e-Infrastructures it has built. The survey by e-FISCAL is an important step in this process, providing cost estimates and comparing them to the closest commercial leased and on-demand services, such as those offered by Amazon.

There are many methods for studying service costs, such as Total Cost of Ownership, but none are entirely appropriate for e-FISCAL’s study. Instead, e-FISCAL brought together several models to find a method that was detailed enough to give good results, but simple enough to make collecting the data easy for participants. The method provides an estimated Annual Cost of Ownership of e-Infrastructure for 2010 and 2011.

This survey builds on a survey conducted by a previous European Commission funded project, e-IRGSP2, as part of research into legal and governance issues around e-Infrastructures.

The survey can be found on-line or as an editable pdf document.
 

On the 11th of December 2001, the European DataGrid (EDG) project (one of EGI’s predecessors) announced at a meeting that a testbed of the first international grid infrastructure was up and running.

This pioneering grid integrated provided by four sites: Manchester University, and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom, CERN, and CNAF site at Bologna. It wasn't long before they had company with CCIN2P3 in Lyon and NIKHEF in Amsterdam joining them within a week.

Ten years on, the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is the world’s largest multidisciplinary grid infrastructure, giving researchers access to state-of-the-art computing facilities across more than 300 sites worldwide.

By late November 2001, the EDG project was only 11 months old and brought together a collection of loosely affiliated computing clusters that people could submit work to by hand. This allowed them to test some of the tools being developed by the project but it was not a real grid. A grid should enable access to distributed remote computational resources when needed by the user but remove the complexity of making the user choose what specific resources to use.

One of the projects involved in EDG was GridPP, the UK’s contribution to the worldwide effort providing computational resources to the LHC experiments. "We had actually done a lot in a very short period of time", explains David Britton, GridPP's project manager at the time, "We had gone from a plan for a proposal in December 2000 to a fully funded infrastructure project, within less than a year. Now EDG and ourselves were about to make the first big step towards a proper grid".

That step was pretty big though; they needed two very important components, an information system and a resource broker. By monitoring the state of the resources on the infrastructure, and taking into account a user’s requirements, these would allow a user to submit jobs "into the grid" and have them automatically routed to a suitable site.

The 11 December announcement was only a humble beginning. The entire system only consisted of 14 machines, Manchester's entire cluster was a single worker node. Andrew McNab from Manchester was part of the integration team that was involved in the work, "It was a pretty exciting time as we were motivated by the idea of connecting hundreds of sites to do computing in a new way. The Integration Team had come to CERN for a fortnight from all across Europe to make it work, and I found out that the CERN and CNAF/Bologna sites had gone live on the Sunday afternoon. I put the final pieces in place on the Manchester site and then late on Sunday night successfully submitted a job to the Broker service at CERN, the job was then run at Manchester. It was like seeing the World Wide Web in the early 1990s: it wasn't very big and things were very rough round the edges, but you knew the technology would scale up enormously and change the way everyone worked.".

In the intervening decade the grid has become indispensable to many communities, the LHC experiments would be lost without the 200,000 machines they can access to do their analysis.

 It's the season to be jolly and everyone at EGI.eu would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 

And remember that our Mascot Competition closes on 31 December. Don't miss the chance to win a touch screen tablet computer and other goodies – make sure you submit your entry before the deadline! Remember that you may enter more than once, as long as entries are made in separate submissions. Visit our mascot page for further information.

Click on the image below (or scan the code with your mobile) to view our festive e-card...

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) warmly welcome today’s announcement from the UK Government of a £75 million commitment from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ Large Facilities Capital Fund (LFCF) for the ELIXIR research infrastructure.

ELIXIR is a pan-European effort to safeguard and foster data generated in life-science experiments. Its core objective is to ensure that Europe can continue to handle a rapidly growing volume and variety of data from high-throughput experiments such as DNA sequencing. Proper management of this information promotes knowledge-based economic growth, and facilitates the translation of research into innovations that meet global challenges in food security, energy and health.

The new funding will allow the construction of ELIXIR’s central hub at EMBL-EBI on the Wellcome Trust Genome campus in Hinxton, Cambridge. The hub will be the nerve centre for bioinformatics in Europe, coordinating the delivery of services and user training from several centres of excellence Europe-wide. The hub will also establish a robust computing infrastructure that can handle the rising tide of life science data.

“This commitment from the UK Government to ELIXIR emphasises the growing importance of biological information to every citizen,” said Professor Janet Thornton, Director of EMBL-EBI and coordinator of the preparatory phase of ELIXIR, which is funded under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme. “This funding puts Europe in a uniquely strong position to solve some of society’s most pressing problems, with the UK right in the middle of the action. In the future we expect similar commitments from ELIXIR’s members around Europe to build their nodes.”

Professor Søren Brunak of the Technical University of Denmark and Chair of the Interim ELIXIR Board said: “In the organisation of the ELIXIR bioinformatics infrastructure the hub is essential. In order for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts we need strong coordination of activities across the different nodes in Europe. The decision to fund the construction of ELIXIR’s central hub is therefore a very important milestone in the development of the distributed infrastructure and we hope that ELIXIR members will in future contribute to its operation.”

Professor Douglas Kell, Chief Executive of BBSRC, said: “Modern life science research has the potential to touch every one of our lives. But in order to support economic growth, new jobs and to improve our standards of living we need better ways to handle the unimaginable amount of data modern approaches generate. The collaborative and centrally accessible approach represented by ELIXIR is the most effective and efficient way for life scientists to store, manage, share and interpret information. Through ELIXIR, we are ensuring our researchers have access to the best infrastructure and services now and in the future. ELIXIR will help us maximise the outputs and impact of the UK’s world-leading life science research base.”

ELIXIR has the potential to enhance the development of Europe-based R&D business in fields ranging from pharmaceuticals to agriculture. Significant financial contributions towards the construction of ELIXIR nodes throughout Europe have already been made by Denmark, Finland, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The operational costs of the hub will be met by shared contributions from participating countries.
 

The registration for the EGI Community Forum 2012 is now open online at: http://go.egi.eu/registration-cf12.

The event will take place at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching near Munich, Germany (26-30 March 2012), hosted by EGI.eu in partnership with the Munich Network Management, a consortium of four German research institutions.

The Community Forum will be held in conjunction with the 2nd EMI Technical Conference and co-located with the 2nd Annual European Globus Community Forum (26 March).

The key goal of the Community Forum is to showcase the role that EGI plays in enabling innovation across the European Research Area. The forum will highlight the services, technologies and tools available to scientific communities to better support their research.

The organisers welcome developers of distributed computing applications & services and the research communities who make use of them to attend the event and find out more about the current state of the art and let your voice be heard to influence the strategy and plans for the future of the EGI community.

The deadline for early-bird registration at discounted rates is 15 February 2012.
 

If you want to submit an abstract to the EGI Community Forum, this is the time to do it: submissions will close on Friday, 2nd December. The forum will be held in Munich (26-30 March 2012), in conjunction with the 2nd EMI Technical Conference and the European Globus Community Forum.

We welcome submissions of individual poster, presentation or demonstrations which will be reviewed by the programme committee and placed into the programme. Requests for community workshops, training activities and internal project meetings are welcomed and will be
accommodated subject to availability.

Submissions will be selected according to their applicability to the following five tracks:

• Users and communities
• Software services for users and communities
• Middleware services
• Operational services and infrastructure
• Coordination and communication

The five tracks reflect the evolution of the infrastructure towards a sustainable layered model together with the advancements in the deployed middleware services which will offer a more flexible and versatile mechanism for meeting the needs of the increasingly diverse user community. The overall goal of the Community Forum and Technical Conference is to both increase and improve use of the infrastructure as well as to further enhance its middleware services.

A second stage reviewing process will be announced later which will lead to the publication of selected papers. Accepted peer-reviewed papers will be published in an open-access online journal.

More information

• Call for participation

Last Tuesday, 22 November, Steven Newhouse signed two Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) on behalf of EGI with the EDGI (European Desktop Grid Initiative) and the SHIWA (SHaring Interoperable Workflows for large-scale scientific simulations on Available DCIs) projects, both represented by Péter Kacsuk.

EDGI is a project developed to deploy desktop grid (DG) and cloud services for EGI heavy user communities. The project will provide a workflow-oriented science gateway to enable easier access to the e-infrastructure and establish the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) to coordinate DG-related activities in Europe and to attract volunteer DG resource donors.

With this agreement, the EDGI production infrastructure will be offered as service for EGI and NGI user communities, “thus enabling and exploiting the possibilities lying within volunteer and institutional desktop grid computing for a wider scientific user community,” says Kacsuk.

The SHIWA project's main goal is to leverage existing workflow based solutions and enable cross-workflow and inter-workflow exploitation of DCIs by applying both coarse- and fine-grained strategies. Kacsuk hopes that the collaboration with EGI will bring SHIWA services to a wider range of communities. And also, “by using SHIWA services EGI community can provide feedback for SHIWA consortium to further improve services,” he adds.

The technology solution provided by SHIWA will enhance interoperability between different workflow communities with different types of workflows, thus enabling more effective collaborations.

At the same occasion, Kacsuk also signed a MoU between EDGI and the e-ScienceTalk project represented by Catherine Gater.

Today Domenico Vicinanza from DANTE presented a new grid-enabled musical composition in a special performance live from the Supercomputing’11 exhibition in Seattle. For this piece, Domenico transformed all the tweets tagged with #SC11 between 11:00 and 11:15 (Seattle time) into one beautiful piece of music using his sonification technique.

But how does that work?

“Sonification, in general terms, is the acoustic counterpart of the graphical data representation,” Domenico explains. “In other words, it is the representation of data or by means of audible information.”

Domenico attributed a specific musical note to each letter of the alphabet and assigned a duration to the notes – vowels lasted a quaver (1/8) and consonants a semiquaver (1/16). The data was sent via the Scinet (the Supercomputing event’s network) to the European Grid Infrastructure, via the GÉANT network, and analysed by a grid-enabled sonification package available on the GILDA infrastructure.

You can hear a sample of the resulting musical piece in this mp3 file. And in a few weeks we’ll update this news item with a video of the presentation Domenico gave at the event, featuring the full-length performance.
 

The first e-Science Café Roadshow was held on the 14th November in Budapest and it was organised by MTA SZTAKI.

The event built on the success of the Hungarian Café Grid in March 2011, which proved that there is a need for events explaining what e-science is and which e-infrastructures are available within Hungary.

The event was hosted by the Obuda University, which is a new candidate for NGI_HU. The invited speakers represented Hungary’s main research institutes and universities including Budapest University of Technology and Economics, KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, National Information Infrastructure Development Institute, SZTAKI Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems.

The topics covered at the event included GPGPU, HPC, grids and desktop grids, as well as clouds. We had 51 participants at this free event, fuelling intense and productive discussions after each presentation. From the feedback results we received, the event can be considered highly successful (5.45 on the scale of 1-6).

The roadshow team has already received inquiries on the next location, so discussions have already started about the next event. The candidates are Szeged, Szekesfehervar, Gyor and Debrecen, cities all well-known in Hungary for their universities. There are also plans to include tutorials and hands-ons to the following events’ schedule.

Our aim is to create a brand with these roadshows, target a wider audience and introduce NGI_HU and the services we can offer to the scientific community.
 

SC11, Seattle, WA, USA -- Nov. 15, 2011 -- The United Kingdom’s National Grid Service (NGS) has adopted Globus Online as the preferred data movement method for its users.

All computing resources available to the NGS community have been added as transfer endpoints in the Globus Online system, a hosted service for high performance data movement, and NGS has been enabled as an identity provider for the service. Using their NGS credentials, users can quickly and easily log in to Globus Online and move files among NGS servers, or between an NGS server and the user’s local server or laptop.

“We aim through the availability of this service to ensure that our users can quickly and easily access the data they need, regardless of the size or location of the data volume,” said David Wallom, NGS Technical Director. “The process to move large volumes of raw information from resources that have generated it, back to the user who needs to manipulate and analyse the results, can be not only time-consuming but also difficult and frustrating for researchers. Enabling Globus Online for NGS data movement will provide a significant value-added service that I know will benefit our users.”

Dr. Wallom further explained, “By using a web-based service, we are also ensuring users will have minimum interaction with what they might consider complex ICT tools and technologies -- whilst giving them access to a sophisticated yet easy-to-use capability.”

Globus Online is a secure, reliable file transfer service that makes it easy to move datasets of any size, whether between supercomputing facilities or from a facility to a local server or personal computer, without requiring custom end-to-end systems.

“We are very happy to provide this service for the hundreds of researchers who rely on NGS resources,” said Ian Foster, Director of the Computation Institute at University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, home to Globus Online. “With the increased capacity for sharing and collaboration that Globus Online provides, NGS users should be able to better focus on their research without the distraction of having to worry about how to move files from here to there.”

A detailed tutorial about using Globus Online with NGS is available at http://www.ngs.ac.uk/globus-online-tutorial

UK NGS users can sign up for a free Globus Online account at https://www.globusonline.org/.

EGI will be at the Supercomputing exhibition in Seattle USA from 14 to 17 November, booth 4005 on level 6.

If you are attending, come over and say hello! We have lots of information about the European grid and goodies such as T-shirts, bags and stickers to giveaway.

We won't be alone! The European distributed computing community will be well represented at the event.

The European Middleware Initiative, one of EGI's technology providers, can be found at booth 763 very close to the Italian Grid Infrastructure (IGI), the Italian NGI (booth 757). The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre & the MNM team, the hosts of the 2012 EGI Community Forum, are at booth 229 and 5111 respectively, the Nordugrid collaboration is at booth 2118 and the Computing Centre of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (CC-IN2P3) will be at 4014.

We will be report on the event on the EGI blog and our brand new Facebook page. Follow us!

The Autumn 2011 issue of the EGI Inspired newsletter was published today, 1 November, and is also available in pdf format.

This issue's features:

• Viviane Li looks under the hedgerows and puts up some posters on lamp posts in search for the EGI mascot
• Steven Newhouse unveils the plan for the revised NA2 work package and introduces the role of NGI Coordinators
• Sven Gabriel reports on the outcome of the 2011 Service Security Challenge
• Agnes Szeberényi introduces an international collaboration against Alzheimer’s disease
• Neasan O'Neill finds how Ernesto Garcia is putting the grid to good use
• Mário David explains how the staged rollout procedure is working
• Damir Marinović asks what to expect from Horizon 2020 and the new Framework Programme for Research and Innovation

Plus:

• A look at the agreements signed behind the scenes of the Technical Forum
• A look into the German NGI, co-host of the first EGI Community Forum

If you want to contribute with ideas, suggestions or stories to the newsletter don't forget to let us know at press@egi.eu
 

The countdown for the first EGI Community Forum has started and the call for participation is now open.

The event will take place at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich, Germany between 26-30 March 2012. The event will be hosted by EGI.eu in partnership with the Munich Network Management, a consortium of four German research institutions, and will be held in conjunction with the second EMI Technical Conference.

The forum will highlight the services, technologies and tools available to scientific communities to better support their research.

The organisers invite all members of the community to submit abstracts for presentations, demonstrations, posters and workshops. The deadline for submissions is 2 December, 2011.

The programme committee, chaired by Steve Brewer EGI.eu’s Chief Community Officer, welcomes abstracts in the following areas:

• Users and communities, their requirements and achievements. Submissions that address the sustainability of different models for the structure of user communities whether large, small, diverse or specialised, will be particularly welcome.
• Software services for users and communities.
• Middleware services.
• Operational services and infrastructure.
• Coordination and Communication.

The Community Forum will take place in the facilities of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) and at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI) building, famous for its indoor slides.

Sadly, the Forum will miss the Oktoberfest, but will coincide with the ‘strong beer season’. The tradition of brewing strong beer dates from the Middle Ages, when the local monasteries brew nutritious beers in late winter, so that they could survive Lent with no ill effects. The enjoyment of strong beer was not regarded as a sin: “Liquid nourishment doesn’t break your fast”. The tradition of strong beer lives on to this day.
 

EGI.eu is pleased to announce its participation in the HealthGrid 2012 Conference and the 4th International Workshop on Science Gateways for Life Sciences.

This joint event will take place at the Amsterdam Medical Centre in The Netherlands from 21 to 25 May 2012 (Monday to Friday).

The conferences present an opportunity for speakers to introduce and share novel ideas for the integration of grid, cloud and other e-infrastructures into the fields of biology, bioinformatics, biomedicine and healthcare, focusing on fundamental and practical aspects of middleware, technologies, applications and deployment issues.

For EGI.eu in particular, this represents an invaluable chance to interact directly with a vitally important sector of the community of researchers and developers that use grid computing resources. As a result, EGI.eu aims to use this opportunity to explore and gather new requirements for future development of our infrastructure and to better understand the needs of today’s users.

Calls for Papers are now open for HealthGrid 2012 and IWSG-Life2012. The conferences welcome contributions covering topics that range from grid technologies through to biomedical research and from portals to workflow and computational modelling.

And, more importantly, was it fast enough to catch you?

Grid computing is helping palaeontologists to understand better how dinosaurs moved around and what roles they played in their ancient world.

With its sharp teeth and massive jaws, the T-rex is the stuff of nightmares. It’s not surprising that scientists are convinced the T-rex was a carnivorous predator but huge teeth don’t tell the whole story. Was it like the modern cheetah and catch its prey in short burst-like sprints? Or was the T-rex a sneaky stalk-and-ambush hunter like the jaguar? What was its place in the Cretaceous ecosystem?

Since we can’t see a real T-rex in action (it disappeared along with the other dinosaurs 65 million years ago), palaeontologists need to look elsewhere to understand its role as a predator. Top running speed offers good clues to solving this mystery – but how do you measure the maximum speed of an extinct animal?

If zebras were to become extinct, the palaeontologists of the future could probably use horses or donkeys as comparisons. People looking at dinosaur behaviour don’t have that luxury because there is nothing alive today quite like a T-rex. The solution is to create a detailed computer simulation of the animal’s skeleton and muscles.

Continue reading...

EGI is looking for a mascot – our characterful ambassador to feature in posters, t-shirts and other goodies and give aways.

But what could this be? Is it an animal, a plant or a mineral? Something abstract? We don’t know so we set up the EGI Mascot Competition to find out.

Use your imagination and surprise us. Submit your idea to the competition and you might win a tablet computer and a free registration to the Community Forum in Munich (26-30 March 2012).

You can also download the competition's poster to advertise the competition in your university or institute.

Here is how it’s going to work:

• Submission of ideas opens 15 October 2011
• Deadline for submissions is 31 December 2011
• Online voting will take place between 11 January-8 February 2012
• The winners will be announced on 15 February 2012

How to enter the competition

Come up with a great idea for a mascot. Tell us what it is, and why and how it represents the European Grid Infrastructure (in no more than 150 words). You can also include an optional image of any kind to support your entry – from a raw sketch to a final drawing, or even a photograph (file format: GIF, PNG or JPEG, 400 pixel maximum on the longest side). While submitting an image is not compulsory, we strongly suggest that you do, because it will help to communicate your idea, especially for the online voting.

When you have all the entry requirements, you are ready to submit. E-mail your submission to mascot@egi.eu with ‘Mascot entry’ in the subject line (this e-mail address is for submitting an entry only. For enquiries, please contact press@egi.eu). You can submit more than one entries, but each entry must be sent in a separate e-mail.
 

BiG Grid, the Dutch National Grid Initiative, and SARA will host a special High Performance Cloud Computing Day, next Tuesday 4 October at the Science Park Amsterdam Conference Hall.

The event has a packed programme with talks and demonstrations of scientific cloud usage and it will finish with the official inauguration of the new national HPC cloud infrastructure.

Registration for the HPC cloud day is free and it is still open.

The demonstrations will be presented by scientists, who will share their HPC and cloud experiences in the Life Sciences, Earth Sciences, Finance and Linguistics, amongst others.

The national HPC cloud will be an important step in the expansion and diversification of the BiG Grid infrastructure, who manages grid computing resources used by the CERN experiments, the LOFAR telescope and life science research.

More information

• Programme
• Directions and registration

The ScalaLife project (Scalable Software Services for Life Science) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI).

The agreement was signed by Steven Newhouse, director of EGI.eu on behalf of the EGI community, and Erwin Laure, ScalaLife’s project director.

“ScalaLife intends to prototype a competence centre for Life Science Researchers that will support them in all questions related to the use of HPC techniques in their work,” says Laure. “Particularly, it will provide help scaling applications, best practices in what algorithms, tools, computational architectures to choose, and help gaining access to computational resources.”

Life science researchers usually require powerful computing tools for their work, including High Throughput and High Performance Computing.

“Through our collaboration with EGI and the EGI-related Life Science communities organised under HealthGrid, ScalaLife will be able to complement its HPC competences with competences in HTC and direct HTC-related issues towards EGI and likewise complement EGI competences such that EGI can relate HPC issues towards ScalaLife,” adds Laure.
 

More information

• About ScalaLife

The first EGI Community Forum, to be held in Munich between 26-30 March 2012, was announced by EGI.eu’s direct Steven Newhouse at the closing plenary of the Lyon Technical Forum.

The event will be hosted by EGI.eu in partnership with the Munich Network Management, a consortium of four German research institutions.

“We’ll organise the first EGI Community Forum to showcase the role that e-infrastructures play in enabling innovation across the Europe,” says Newhouse. “We want the forum to highlight what the EGI community is doing in terms of services, technologies and tools to support scientists and their research.”

The organisers will invite developers of distributed computing applications & services and the research communities who make use of them to attend the event and find out more about the current state of the art.

The Community Forum will be co-located with the European Middleware Initiative (EMI) technical conference and other events.

More information will be available soon.

External links

• Community Forum website

The EGI Technical Forum 2011 will kick off on Monday 19 September at the Lyon Convention Centre. This meeting is co-located with the Open Grid Forum 33, the French Grid Day, GlobusEUROPE, the 12th IEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid 2011) and the 9th e-Infrastructure Concertation meeting.

We look forward to welcoming you to the event next week, in partnership with the Computing Centre of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (CC-IN2P3), France Grilles, the French National Grid Initiative and EGI.eu.

If you're joining us in Lyon, here is some useful information and logistical details about the event that you may find useful:

Directions to the venue

Registration: Online registration for the event is now closed but registration is still possible at the venue itself. The registration desk (at the entrance to the Rhône Pasteur level of the Lyon Convention Centre) opens at 8am on Monday 19 September and will be open every day until 6pm. When you arrive, please visit the registration desk to collect your conference pack and details of the wi-fi.

Weather conditions: Late Summer in Lyon can have a bit of everything, so be prepared! Online weather forecast for Lyon.

Programme

• The conference programme is available online.
• More abouth the exhibition area
• Please join us for welcome drinks at the ground floor level on Monday evening (from 17:30)
• You are also invited to the GlobusEUROPE cocktail reception on Tuesday evening (from 17:30, also at the ground floor level)

Conference dinner: The conference dinner will take place on Wednesday 21 September at the L'Abbaye de Collonges restaurant. The plan is to reach the restaurant by boat, so you will have the opportunity to enjoy a tour on the Saone River before dinner. You can find details on the printed programme in your conference bag. The gala dinner is fully booked, entry is by ticket only. If you have completed registration for the dinner, your ticket will be available for collection at the registration desk. If you have registered for the dinner but do not wish to attend, please hand your ticket in at the registration desk before 13:00 on Wednesday 21 September, so places can be reallocated to someone else who would like to come.

Visit the new Computing Room
We will organise several visits to the new CC-IN2P3 computing room. If you are interested, please ask the desk at your arrival on site. More information

Follow us live!
> Twitter (#egi2010)
> Flickr stream (use the EGI TF2011 tag for your own photos)
> GridCast blog from the e-ScienceTalk. Contact press@egi.eu if you would like to blog!

If you have any questions, please contact us at events@egi.eu.

HPCwire, a leading online magazine specialised in high-performance computing and the people who run them, will be covering the EGI Technical Forum live from Lyon as one of the event’s media partners.

The media partnership was announced today by Tabor Communications Inc., who published HPCwire, and the organisers of the EGI Technical Forum and the co-located GlobusEUROPE event.

"We are honored to have been invited to be a media sponsor for the GlobusEUROPE Conference and the EGI Technical Forum," said Jeff Hyman, President and Publisher of HPCwire. "As a leading resource for providing information about Globus and grid computing to the HPC community, covering the latest in technological advancements being shared during the conference is essential for our readers stay informed on these solutions. What we are initiating now is the first steps to what we believe will become long and successful partnership, year after year."

HPCwire will be on site, covering of the latest news, technologies, and solutions presented during the events for their readers.

"Co-locating our annual EGI Technical Forum and the first GlobusEUROPE conference, alongside other events, will provide a unique opportunity for the community to engage with the current developments of e-Infrastructure in Europe, standards development activities, and computer science research in a diverse and fast-moving field," said Catherine Gater, Deputy Director of EGI.eu and Project Coordinator for e-ScienceTalk. "Our partnership with HPCwire at these events is an exciting opportunity that will help us to reach out to the EGI community and beyond."

"We recognize the importance of partnering with the leading publication for high performance computing," said Steve Tuecke, co-PI for the Globus project and Deputy Director at the University of Chicago's Computation Institute (CI). "HPCwire reaches a global and highly-engaged audience that is both interested in and knowledgeable about Globus, grid, and distributed computing solutions. HPCwire was a natural fit for us as our media partner, given their high journalistic quality and the relationship we have already established working together during the GlobusWORLD Conference earlier this year."
 

The MAPPER project (Multiscale Applications on European e-Infrastructures) has joined the official list of EGI partners signing a Memorandum of Understanding in August. This agreement ensures that the solutions developed by MAPPER and its partners are compatible with the European grid.

This is another step towards making EGI an integral part of the computing resources offered to European researchers and their international collaborators.

“MAPPER is a science driven project with the aim to exploit existing European e-infrastructures for a new mode of computing,” says project coordinator Alfons Hoekstra. “To do so MAPPER has brought together a strong European consortium covering the chain from the infrastructure to the science applications, and by closely collaborating with EGI and PRACE.”

The main goal of the MAPPER project is to develop “an environment for distributed multiscale computing, consisting of dedicated programming and execution tools, and production quality services that are needed to support this mode of computing,” explains Hoekstra.

The MAPPER focus on multiscale is important given that many areas of research focus on investigating phenomena at every level of the system, from the microscopic to the global and everything in between. Climate and weather modelling are important examples, being able to take into account the global state of the weather, but also local conditions, is important in understanding how the entire system works and its possible future direction.

The MAPPER project, started in October 2010, aims to develop tools, software and services to maximise the usage of e-infrastructures by this community.

Starting with 5 specific areas - fusion, clinical decision making, systems biology, nano-science and engineering - they will help each create the tools needed for a specific problem within that discipline. They will ensure that the solutions being offered to researchers are not only appropriate but also provide access to them.

Online registration for the EGI Technical Forum will end this Friday 5 September.

The Technical Forum will be held in Lyon (19-23 September), hosted by EGI.eu, the Computing Centre of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (CC-IN2P3) and France Grilles, the French National Grid Initiative.

A draft programme for the event is available online.

The event will be co-located with the Open Grid Forum, Grid 2011, GlobusEUROPE and the French Grid Day. The Technical Forum will provide a unique opportunity to appreciate the current developments of e-Infrastructure in Europe and the standards development activity and longer-term computer science research being undertaken in this diverse and exciting field.

Dominique Boutigny, director of CC-IN2P3 representing the Institut des Grilles (the French NGI and our local host) will welcome us. During the week our regular technical activity will be complemented by keynote speakers drawn from within and outside Europe, including:

• Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist based at Johns Hopkins University who has been involved in the data analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project, will share his experiences in using high performance networks for data transfer and analysis.
• Kostas Glinos, Head of the European Commission's GÉANT & e-Infrastructures Unit, will speak about strategies for e-Infrastructures in Europe.
• Andrew Grimshaw from the University of Virginia and a member of the Open Grid Forum and a technical architect with the XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) project that has continued the work started in TeraGrid who will be talking about the role standards are playing in federating their large HPC and Campus based Grid.
• Erik Bongcam-Rudloff from the University of Uppsala who is a biologist and computer scientist who has been active in the adoption of grids and distributed computing within the life-sciences community and HealthGrid.
• Carl-Christian Buhr from the Cabinet of Neelie Kroes (Vice-President of the European Commission and responsible for Digital Agenda in Europe) where he is active in the EC’s Cloud Computing strategy.

More information

• 2011 EGI Technical Forum homepage
• Destination: Lyon (Inspired newsletter article)
   

Hundreds of web servers online with a single click - Platform as a Service developed by Contrail

Imagine your brilliant idea turns out to be so succesful that you need to go from one web server to a thousand in a couple of hours. The Cloud is the answer. But it would demand experts packaging your application and writing scripts to manage the Cloud. Well, this was before ConPaaS. With ConPaaS, bringing hundreds of web servers and application servers on-line is done with no more than a single mouse click.

"No, it is not publicly available just yet, but we are close to releasing an Alpha version", says Guillaume Pierre from the VU Amsterdam. He is all too aware that the industry has allready shown interest in ConPaaS, and it appears to be the solution for a great demand. Pierre leads a research group on large-scale distributed systems at VU University Amsterdam, and he is the leader of Platform-as-a-Service efforts in the Contrail Project. Contrail is a large European project in which eleven organisations from six countries collaborate to transform the current heterogeneous Cloud into a federated, easy accessible homegeneous environment. ConPaaS is part of the software stack that Contrail will produce and it is the first component available.

"Once your bright idea really takes off, you're in desperate need of resources. Getting more resources is easy using existing Cloud offerings, like Amazon EC2 or an OpenNebula based Cloud. But it is not as easy to deploy your application on these new resources, to package your application for different existing Cloud providers, or to switch from one to the other without stopping your application. Here's where ConPaaS comes in: it provides Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in a new and easy way".

Need another webserver? Just click +1 in the webserver menu. Need 100? Guess what you need to type. You can bring up PHP, Java Servlet and Database engines in no time with just a click of your mouse. ConPaaS bundles all relevant data in one screen and makes resources available with just one click.

Pierre: "Even our first demo's already sparked attention from the industry. We expect the first release to be ready in a month. We will release the entire software in open-source, and there will also be a public testbed where anyone can try ConPaaS for free. Later in the Contrail Project we will integrate ConPaaS with other components like Cloud Federation and federated security to make ConPaaS even more widely applicable."

The Hydrometeorological Research Community (HMRC) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the European Grid Infrastructure on 22 August. The agreement was signed by EGI.eu’s director Steven Newhouse on behalf of the EGI community, and Antonio Parodi project leader of the CIMA Research Foundation and HMRC coordinator.

“The HMRC is constituted by scientists undertaking fundamental and applied research in the field of measurement, analysis and modeling of atmospheric and land surface processes tied to the hydrologic cycle, with a growing emphasis on the prediction and prevention of natural disasters associated with flash-floods, landslides, and forest fires,” says Parodi.

Over the past decade, the hydrometeorological sciences have made progress thanks to new modelling tools, post-processing methodologies and wider availability of observational data. “However, the awareness of the potential of the grid technology as a catalyst for future hydrometeorological research is still low,” Parodi adds.

With this agreement, Parodi hopes to catch up and make the most of the possibilities offered by the EGI e-infrastructure, in particular “to advance the exchange and interfacing of methods and know-how available in both grid and hydrometeorological communities.”

The MoU will also facilitate the identification, communication and discussion of requirements for porting and deployment of state-of-the-art hydrometeorological research, as well as the improvement and standardisation on research-specific services through the exchange of grid expertise.

Steve Brewer, Chief Community Officer at EGI.eu says: “I welcome the fact that HMRC is committed to bringing the added value of distributed computing to hydrometeorological scientists. Furthermore, EGI fully supports their goal of maximising the impact and accessibility of their research, which covers areas of crucial importance to all our lives.”
 

The organisers of the International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2012 invite contributions to the event’s scientific programme. The event will take place at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan from 26 February to 2 March 2012. The deadline for abstract submission is 7 October 2011.

2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the ISGC conferences which have covered the evolution of the distributed computing community in the Asia Pacific region. During this decade, ISGC became a leading event to promote e-Science, research and international collaborations and a forum to share knowledge and experiences.

This year, ISGC will be dedicated to the theme ‘Convergence, Collaboration, Innovation’ and is chaired by Steven Newhouse, director of EGI.eu.

The programme committee welcomes contributions in areas covering High Energy Physics, Biomedicine & Life Sciences, Earth Science, Environmental Changes and Natural Disaster Mitigation, Humanities & Social Sciences, Operations & Management, Middleware & Interoperability, Security and Networking, Infrastructure Clouds & Virtualisation, Business Models & Sustainability, Data Management, Distributed Volunteer & Desktop Grid Computing, High Throughput Computing, and High Performance, Manycore & GPU Computing.

More information

• Submission deadline: 7 October 2011
• ISGC 2012 website
   

TransferSummit 2011, the enterprise-research forum on Open Source, will take place 5-8 September at Keble College, Oxford, to provide an intimate setting to address the requirements, challenges, and opportunities in the use, development, licensing, and future of Open Source technology.

This year's theme, “Open Innovation Everywhere”, features a mobile focus and special government summit. Only TransferSummit provides strategic solutions that improve collaboration between commercial and academic concerns, offers access to influencers and valuable research, and transfers creative ideas to meet business challenges through the use of Open Source technologies. Highlights include:

• Keynote by Tony Hey, senior VP of Microsoft Research Connections on “Standards, Interoperability and Open Source”;
• Plenary by Mark O'Neill, CIO: DCMS Open Data Campaign/Communities and Local Government, Founder of Cabinet Office Skunkworks project on "Innovating in Government ICT";
• Special presentation by Tariq Rashid, Home Office lead architect on "UK Government Open Source Action Plan";
• Presentations by Adobe, London School of Economics, The MITRE Corporation, RedHat, University of Bolton, Canonical, WSO2, HP, OSS Watch, Outercurve Foundation, Sirius, Wikimedia, University of Oxford, OpenDirective, eBay, Alfresco, Mozilla, Moorcrofts, IBM, and more;
• Ample networking opportunities and events that include Open Gadget Playtime, Birds/Beers of a Feather sessions, and "Best of British" gala dinner;
• Hands-on, pre-conference trainings on diverse topics including licensing, governance, and sustainability connect today's challenges with upcoming opportunities in Open Source.

Limited to just 300 participants, TransferSummit is intimate and interactive, offering EGI Members a unique opportunity to meet, learn, and debate with key representatives from a wide range of research projects, businesses, and government. The many sessions on open development will be of particular interest to both individual members and EGI itself in ensuring that collaborative development of the strategic Unified Middleware Distribution is as effective as possible, and enhances the roadmap.

The organizers of TransferSummit are pleased to extend members of the EGI Community 10% off trainings and general registration rates to those who register before Friday 26 August. To ensure a spot is reserved for you, please sign up at http://transfersummit.com/ and use the discount code “EGI” on the payment page. See you in Oxford!

Stay informed by following the latest event updates posted on the @TransferSummit Twitter feed and #TS11 hashtag.
 

We are delighted to announce that JISC will continue to fund the National Grid Service (NGS) until 31 July 2012. This will allow the NGS to carry on supporting its broad user base across the UK and to strengthen their links into Europe and beyond. We will not only be able to support users but to also develop further the essential relationship that we have with our member institutions. This will include further roadshows and outreach activities at universities and research institutions that have a significant current or prospective user base, including current user experiences and training events for getting started..

During the coming period we will continue to actively work with large international projects with bases in the UK, for example ELIXIR, Lifewatch, SKA and CLARIN. We recently held two workshops to gather their ongoing e-infrastructure requirements, to ensure that the UK can support their ongoing needs and remain a leader in Europe.

Beginning in April 2011, the NGS moved to a new model of service. A new policy was introduced offering all NGS users a moderate allocation of compute resources for free, a lifeline for pump priming novel projects and for early career researchers who might otherwise struggle to receive resources directly from grants. The NGS has been working with larger projects and individuals with more significant requirements and can now offer competitively priced compute and data services through its partner sites.

This phase of the NGS also includes the availability of central services so that remote sites are able to easily monitor, account and control the user base for their services when these users come not only from their own institution but from collaborating institutions. These services are particularly targeted towards the larger national and international projects of which the UK is a significant partner.

David Wallom, Technical Director said “This extension is a further demonstration of the importance of a core research computing service available at a national level, supporting projects from the large international infrastructures through to the small single researcher activity. The NGS supports the federation of resources between institutions and the central services which are essential to avoid duplication of effort in larger projects.”

If you are interested in purchasing resources or services from the NGS, please contact the NGS helpdesk (support@grid-support.ac.uk).
 

The goal to integrate virtualised resources in the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is one step closer. On Tuesday 9 August the Technology Coordination Board (TCB) gave a mandate to the community to create the EGI Federated Clouds Task Force.

Over the next 18 months, the task force will work with the community to develop a ‘blueprint’ for EGI resource centres that wish to securely federate and share their virtualised environments as part of the production infrastructure. Other goals include:

• Define and prototype solutions for monitoring, accounting and advertising through the information services virtualised resources
• Investigate and analyse requirements
• Provide feedback to relevant technology providers (both within and external to the TCB)
• Identify issues that need to be addressed by other areas of EGI (e.g. policy, operations, support & dissemination)

The task force will also work closely with user communities willing to become early adopters of the resulting virtualised infrastructure to help prioritise its development.

Michel Drescher, Technology Manager at EGI.eu explains: “The idea is to produce a blueprint document with advice and, where available full documentation, to resource centres and users on how to engage with the federated virtualised environment.” The blueprint will be made available on the EGI Wiki.

“The task force will seek to find out what resource centres actually need to start their own virtualised resources,” Drescher adds. “While expanding the test bed, the task force will provide best practices, recommendations, and documentation for user communities, resource centres and software providers on how to engage with EGI in a federated virtualised infrastructure.”

The EGI Federated Clouds Task Force is looking for active members that wish to contribute their knowledge, resources and software to set up a test bed for a federated virtualised infrastructure in EGI:

• If you are looking to become an active member of EGI's virtualisation efforts then contact fedcloud-tf@mailman.egi.eu.
• If you are interested in contributing to the virtualisation discussion or would like to keep updated on ongoing activities, feel free to use or join cloud-discuss@mailman.egi.eu.

More information

• EGI User Virtualisation Workshop

The Summer 2011 issue of the EGI Inspired newsletter was published last Friday, 5 August, and is available online and in pdf format.

This issue's features:

• Cyril L'Orphelin introduces the latest improvements to the EGI Operations Portal
• Steve Brewer reports on the HealthGrid meeting in Bristol
• Richard McLennan wants everyone in the community to visit the new Training Marketplace
• Rosette Vandenbroucke tells us about the newly published e-IRG White Paper 2011
• Sergio Andreozzi is looking for the best Service Level Management practices
• Viviane Li investigated what Lyon has to offer in preparation for the EGI Technical Forum
• Sara Coelho brings you a profile of France Grilles, the Technical Forum's co-hosts

If you want to contribute with ideas, suggestions or stories to the newsletter don't forget to let us know at press@egi.eu
 

The European Commission has launched a contest to recognise and reward women that have created outstanding innovations and developed their ideas from drawing board to the market.

The EU Prize for Women Innovators will be awarded to three women entrepreneurs, who were at some point during their careers beneficiaries of funding for projects under the Framework Programme (FP) or the Competitive and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).

The idea behind the prize is to raise awareness of the crucial role innovation plays in modern life and highlight valuable contributions from women researchers. The Commission hopes that recognising the work of female entrepreneurs will inspire other women to follow suit.

The panel of independent judges, drawn from industry and academia, will consider innovative work in any field or business. The jury will award three prizes:

• 1st prize: €100,000
• 2nd prize: €50,000
• 3rd prize: €25,000

The competition is open to women residing in a EU member state or countries associated with the FP for research. Contestants must be founders, or co-founders, of active companies registered before 1 January 2009 and with annual turnovers in excess of €100,000. Either the contestant or the company must have received funding under the FP or CIP programmes.

The deadline for applications is 20 September 2011 at 17:00 (Brussels local time). The award ceremony will take place on 5 December 2011 at the Innovation Convention organised by the European Commission in Brussels.

More information

• Application form and contest rules
• The EGI-InSPIRE Gender Action Plan
   

Early bird registration for the EGI Technical Forum at discounted fees ends in 5 August, this Friday.

The Technical Forum will be held in Lyon (19-23 September), hosted by EGI.eu, the Computing Centre of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (CC-IN2P3) and France Grilles, the French National Grid Initiative. A draft programme for the event is now available.

The event will be co-located with the Open Grid Forum, Grid 2011, GlobusEUROPE and the French Grid Day. It will provide a unique opportunity to appreciate the current developments of e-Infrastructure in Europe and the standards development activity and longer-term computer science research being undertaken in this diverse and exciting field.

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

• Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist based at Johns Hopkins University and involved in the data analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project, will share his experiences in using high performance networks for data transfer and analysis.
• Kostas Glinos, Head of the European Commission's GÉANT & e-Infrastructures Unit, will speak about strategies for e-Infrastructures in Europe.
• Andrew Grimshaw from the University of Virginia and a member of the Open Grid Forum and a technical architect with the eXtreme Digital (XD) initiative that follows on from the TeraGrid project.

Early-bird registration rates end on 5 August, although normal registration for the event will be possible until 9 September.

More information

• 2011 EGI Technical Forum homepage
   

The European Commission (EC) has announced the next round of funding under the FP7 framework (the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development) – Work Programme 2012.

An indicative budget of €36 million is set aside for e-infrastructures, distributed as follows:

• Third implementation phase of the European High Performance Computing (HPC) service PRACE (INFRA-2012-2.3.1, €20 million)
• International cooperation with the USA on common e-infrastructure for scientific data (INFRA-2012-2.3.2, €2 million)
• Coordination actions, conferences and studies supporting policy development, including international cooperation, for e-Infrastructures (INFRA-2012-2.3.3, €14 million)

In addition to the above, there is a €1 million budget under the FP7 Cooperation framework to identify and document the difficulties and benefits for scientists sharing, accessing and using open access primary data (ENV.2012.6.5-3: Exploring opportunities for open access to primary environmental data).

Details on the call for proposals are available from the EC website:

• e-infrastructures, INFRA-2012-2.3.1, 2 and 3
• Environment – ENV.2012.6.5-3

FP7 is the European Union's (EU) main channel for funding research and runs from 2007 to 2013. It was designed to respond to employment needs and competitiveness, and support research in priority areas.

Beyond FP7, plans for the next funding programme are already underway. It will be called ‘Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation’. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Research, Innovation and Science Commissioner for the EU explains: “it is the name for the new, integrated funding system that will cover all research and innovation funding currently provided through the Framework Programme for Research and Technical Development, the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). These different types of funding will be brought together in a coherent and flexible manner.” Geoghegan-Quinn continues, “funding will focus more clearly on addressing global challenges. Needless red tape will be cut out and participation made simpler.”

The new name ‘Horizon 2020’ was arrived at by an open call for proposal in March earlier this year. Three entries from more than 160,000 ideas were shortlisted. The final winner was determined by online voting. ‘Horizon 2020’ won with a majority of 36.7% of the 8,318 total votes casted. The suggestion came from a teacher from the Czech Republic, and another teacher from Poland, who both proposed the same name.

The Horizon 2020 framework will come into effect from 1 January 2014.

Related Links

• Blog post about Horizon 2020 and its significance for e-infrastructure

One of the advantages of using the grid is that it makes life easier for researchers who want to collaborate on the same or similar experiments, but are physically located in different countries. In the past six years, much effort has been invested in the development of the European Grid Infrastructure to make this possible for the European Research Area. Best practice and lessons learned during this period can be invaluable for grids and other e-infrastructures being established around the world. On 11 July 2011, EGI-InSPIRE signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the CHAIN (Co-ordination & Harmonisation of Advanced e-INfrastructures) project to further connections with other regions of the world.

The CHAIN project plans to bring the operational and organisational principles of European e-infrastructures (especially the grid) to Asia, Mediterranean, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Its vision to seamlessly integrate e-infrastructures with these regions will help to facilitate international collaborations for scientists within the European Research Area.

“Our ultimate goal is to provide European scientists and their international partners with a sustainable, integrated, reliable e-infrastructure that can support their needs for large-scale data analysis,” says Steven Newhouse, Project Director of EGI-InSPIRE. “The CHAIN project helps to support this mission by promoting integrated operations and sustainability within regional e-infrastructures with which our user community is collaborating.”

EGI-InSPIRE and CHAIN will work together on various areas needed for integrated sustainable operations. They will define roadmaps for: the interoperation and integration between the European Grid Infrastructure and the regional grid infrastructures involved; operational tools and their future development; and adopting open standards for grid resources where available. Effort will be made to identify, foster and connect related Virtual Research Communities common between the two activities. To help them use the e-infrastructures, support materials and applications will be made available on the training marketplace and applications database. Both parties will co-ordinate communication activities to maximise impact. They will also share a range of knowledge on their respective National Grid Initiatives, from operations to policy.

“CHAIN is focusing on Virtual Research Communities that have an intercontinental span, such as those investigating climate change, and need to work seamlessly across different eInfrastructures. They obviously require interoperable infrastructures that allow researchers to easily access not only computing resources but, even more important, large data repositories that are shared worldwide. EGI-InSPIRE and CHAIN are synergistically promoting such research activities supporting the removal of the barriers and obstacles to a fruitful collaboration of the best minds in all the regions of the world”, concludes Federico Ruggieri, Project Director of CHAIN.

The software provisioning team at the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has released the first version of the Unified Middleware Distribution (UMD-1). This is a major milestone in providing a consistent platform for all researchers in the European Research Area to gain access to suitable and integrated computing resources.

Every research community has different goals and requirements for their computing and data needs. Many have developed and maintained their own solutions, which work for them. For many years, the European grid has been offering researchers a distributed computing system across different middleware. The goal of the UMD is to provide a system that the community’s existing solutions can easily plug into, not replace, so that these solutions can be deployed at scale across Europe. It will offer a set of well-defined, stable and general-purpose software components to meet their needs.

So for the last year, EGI and its partners have been working with technology providers and users to work out what they need to offer as a sustainable base on which users can build. The chosen components are collectively known as UMD and have been verified to work in the environment used within EGI. Leading the work has been Michel Drescher; EGI’s Technical Manger; he is excited by what they have achieved: “Just getting this far has been a mammoth task. We have consulted a huge range of stakeholders, reviewed every software package on the grid and come up with what we believe provides the best support structure we can. This is however only a first step, we will learn a lot from this initial deployment to improve future releases”.

UMD 1.0.0 is the first release of UMD-1 for the European Grid Infrastructure. This initial release contains the most critical products from EGI's Technology Providers, as agreed by the Technology Coordination Board on behalf of the EGI community. Further versions will be released in the near future incorporating more features, including the full EMI (European Middleware Initiative) software stack and IGE (Initiative for Globus in Europe) components.

EGI-InSPIRE has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the DECIDE (Diagnostic Enhancement of Confidence by an International Distributed Environment) project on 6 July 2011. This document defines a framework of collaboration between both parties and formalises the working relationship.

DECIDE aims to set-up a dedicated grid e-infrastructure for use by medical specialists. Users will be able to quickly identify early signs of Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia (by comparing patients' brain scans with scans from healthy individuals) using computing resources provided by the European grid. As well as analysing medical images, the grid will also securely store and share the data among trusted users.

A key to treating degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's is an early diagnosis of the condition – analysis on the grid naturally brings advantages because of its ability to process large amounts of data quickly and securely, accessible at any time, from anywhere. "Thanks to the agreement with EGI, the medical community will benefit from a substantial increase in computational resources relying on an homogeneous European distributed infrastructure. This will help in facing the problem of processing huge amount of produced data in order to extract useful biomarkers to enhance confidence in early diagnosis," says Laura Leone, DECIDE project coordinator.

As part of the agreement, EGI-InSPIRE will work with DECIDE to identify user requirements, develop support tools and services, set-up and support Virtual Research Communities. These will be implemented with a view to the long-term sustainability of the services. Progress and results of the collaboration will be clearly communicated to communities from both parties. Finally, aspects of the collaboration will also benefit the wider grid community, for example, in the form of training materials and applications.

"The signing is a significant step forward in establishing a channel for long-term interaction and collaboration, that will allow us to provide an e-infrastructure suitable for the needs of the DECIDE medical community," says Steven Newhouse, Project Director of EGI-InSPIRE. "As many societies face the future of an increasing aging population, the grid can play a significant role in the early diagnosis of degenerative brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's, which affects many people around the world."

Earlier this month EGI.eu signed a Letter of Intent with two European Commission funded projects aiming to provide the arts and humanities with an e-Infrastructure of their own. The two projects, DARIAH and CLARIN, both signed the three-way agreement, which has the express intention of ensuring that technology developed by the two projects and the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) are compatible and provides the best service to their users. The agreement also provides a blueprint for similar arrangements between EGI.eu and other user communities that are interested in exploring grid technology but are temporarily constrained from establishing a Virtual Research Community.

While there is a wide range of research using the European grid, the arts and humanities are currently under represented but both DARIAH and CLARIN aim to remedy this. CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) is focussed on creating tools and resources for the language community, while DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) supports the wider humanities and arts community. The two projects are part of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) programme. This initiative helps to support a coherent approach to policy-making on research infrastructures in Europe so that researchers get the resources/technologies they need.

This latest agreement cements the relationship between the 2 ESFRI projects and EGI.eu, helping all three to develop common tools and technologies while exploring further opportunities for collaboration. Connecting EGI with the infrastructures developed by these two projects will have benefits for the sites within partner countries providing the resources, benefits for the countries themselves in terms of integrating the resource centres with the EGI monitoring and support services and finally, benefits for the research communities in terms of support, advice and influence over the evolving infrastructure. The first priority however is to understand the needs of the communities that DARIAH and CLARIN represent so that they can build and manage an infrastructure for their users. The areas of greatest concern are; data storage and availability, the hosting and monitoring of services as well as authentication and authorisation issues.

Chief Community Officer, Steve Brewer said: “For EGI this is the first step in establishing and welcoming a valuable new user community onto the European grid, DARIAH and CLARIN represent a broad range of interests across the arts, humanities and social sciences with, between them, a wealth of digitally-enabled methods and tools to integrate with the infrastructure.”

Outside the agreement with EGI, CLARIN and DARIAH have also agreed to co-organise the SDH 2011 conference in Copenhagen later in the year. The meeting, the full name of which is “Supporting the Digital Humanities: Answering the unaskable”, will be held in the Danish capital on the 17th and 18th of November. It will provide a forum for discussing the benefits of the e-Infrastructures to the arts and humanities alongside how new forms of research can be facilitated and supported.

• More information about the agreement and the two projects
• Information about SDH 2011

One particular research area that benefits hugely from easy access to computational resources is the analysis of medical images, like brain scans or x-ray images. In a paper published in this month’s Nature Reviews Neurology various infrastructures on offer to the biomedical community are compared, including EGI’s partner neuGRID.

Research into neurodegenerative diseases uses imaging techniques to help diagnose, and track the progress of, numerous illnesses including Alzheimer’s. Until recently however the image collections used by the researchers have been usually collected locally, and only being 10s or 100s of images. However thanks to a growth in the availability and accessibility of clinical and research imaging data, the area is being transformed.

The teams now working on these illnesses have access to data sets made up of literally hundreds of thousands of individual images. Traditionally only a few laboratories had the expertise and computational resources required to make use of the data. However recent developments in e-Science have changed this and there are many solutions available to the community.

The paper is a review of the three major projects helping overcome the image overload; neuGRID, LONI and CBRAIN. All three use different techniques, technologies and image sets, making them equally useful to different researchers. LONI and CBRAIN focus on using High Performance Computing resources while neuGRID is based on the technology provided by EGI as well as using the computational resources of the infrastructure.

David Manset, from the neuGRID project and Technical Coordinator of its international chapter outGRID, is one of the paper’s authors “Putting this paper together has been a great experience. neuGRID has achieved a lot in the last 3 years and it has been interesting learning about the differences between our approach and the others. I also hope that the paper raises awareness of the tools on offer to the community by the three projects”.

The paper, Virtual imaging laboratories for marker discovery in neurodegenerative diseases, is published in July’s Nature Reviews Neurology – Doi:10.1038/nrneurol.2011.99

 
neuGRID launches its new phase later this month called “neuGRID for you (N4U): expansion of neuGRID services and outreach to new user communities”, led by Giovanni Frisoni, who was also principal investigator of neuGRID, which will aim to expand the services offered by neuGRID to their end users.

Last week the StratusLab project launched a production release of their eponymous software, StratusLab 1.0. This first stable distribution makes it even easier to turn available computing resources into a cloud environment, and in the process lowers one of the barriers to providing resources to the European grid.

The team at StratusLab has spent the last 12 months working with users and system administrators to provide a set of tools for creating and managing a private cloud-based infrastructure. For users still unsure about moving to the cloud the project also provide a reference infrastructure running their latest tools. This allows potential users to see what they can do with the system before investing time and effort in setting one up.

One of the clear benefits of this work for the European grid, however, is the ability to create and run a grid site on a StratusLab cloud. In fact the Greek National Grid already has one of their sites up and running like this using a previous version of the software. This makes it easier for institutes with limited resources to join and contribute to the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI).

Dr Charles Loomis, the Project coordinator, has been very happy with the progress: "thanks to everyone pulling together we have been able to ship four beta releases and this production release in our first year, which is brilliant. Alongside the speed of development is the quality of our product, demonstrated by the Greek NGI using our software to run a certified EGI grid site in the cloud. I'm looking forward to the next 12 months, which will bring a series of incremental releases featuring improvements to existing services and added functionality."

It is not only the developers who are happy with StratusLab, researchers from various disciplines have been interested in the benefits that this work could have for them. One of these, Christophe Blanchet of the Institut de Biologie et Chimie des Protéines (IBCP) France, hopes to see the work become a standard tool for bioinformatics research: “French bioinformatics platforms are planning to use StratusLab to help the deployment of their site inside our national grid infrastructure. This will also allow them to use the flexibility and elasticity of the cloud to provide bioinformaticians and biologists with a simple way to access the bioinformatics services and applications needed to analyse the massive biological datasets normal in modern research."

Currently the software offers the benefits of both systems, from cloud’s ease of adding new resources to grid’s openness and wealth of applications. The team are not finished yet though. They will continue to add more functionality to StratusLab, including the ability to interface with commercial cloud services.

The key features of StratusLab v1.0 are:

• It is a full production-ready release with many bug-fixes and enhancements
• Uses the OpenNebula 2.2 virtual infrastructure manager
• includes the Claudia platform service management toolkit for dynamic service provisioning and scalability
• has a marketplace allowing user communities to create, search for and share customised digitally-signed virtual machine images
• numerous Base OS images are available in the Marketplace as well as grid and bioinformatics appliances
• persistent storage allows users to create and access disks on remote cloud storage resources
• provides a sophisticated web-monitoring tool
• has easy-to-use command line tools for system administrators and users
• uses an authentication proxy service which allows cloud authentication via X509 grid certificates
• provides both manual and Quattor installation options

Try out StratusLab and find out the full technical details and downloads 

The 7^th White Paper of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group has been released this week. It addresses some interesting challenges for new and on-going e-Infrastructures in seven chapters.

Innovation is the common thread throughout, with emphasis on the governance of e-Infrastructures. “Existing e-Infrastructures need to look with a critical eye at their current governance model when preparing for innovation,” says Rosette Vandenbroucke, White Paper editor and e-IRG delegate. Are the governance models currently used sufficient to guarantee their future? Who should be the players in this model besides the service providers – the governments, the private sector, the user or a combination of these?

The document reflects upon the future role and development of Research networks and gives recommendations for policy makers.

It addresses the development of Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting, calling for new visions to realise the interworking and sustainability of the e-Infrastructure ecosystem.  

Energy and Green IT – efficient energy use, green energy, cheap energy, and energy consumption by ICT are daily topics on many management agendas. But is cheap energy compatible with green energy?

Supercomputing continues to spearhead innovation as countries and companies strive for the most powerful supercomputer. But can we go from T-flops to P-flops and can we efficiently use such computing power? Does a software revolution need to take place before supercomputing can make a leap forward?

Services are of growing importance, especially from a user’s perspective. Which services should be delivered and at what level of quality?

Finally, Data infrastructures are discussed, with a few suggestions for the set-up of European data infrastructures.

“The e-IRG White Paper 2011, especially the written recommendations in the end of every chapter, should be taken into consideration by governments, in particular ministries responsible for research, funding agencies and the European Commission. It is however also of interest to individual researchers and users of e-Infrastructures as an incentive to let their voices be heard”, Vandenbroucke concludes.

Visit the e-IRG website for more information, download the White Paper, and read a summary of comments gathered during the consultation phase in spring. You can also contact the e-IRG secretariat: secretariat@e-irg.eu

Registration is now open for the Technical Forum (19‐23 September) in Lyon (http://go.egi.eu/tf11-registration). Early-bird registration fees apply until 5 August 2011.

A provisional timetable for the event it’s also now available.

The event will be hosted by EGI.eu, the Computing Centre of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (CC-IN2P3) and France Grilles, the French National Grid Initiative.

Registration is available for one, two or three days, or the full week including the conference dinner. The conference fees include access to all co-located events running on the day or days specified in the registration.

The co-located events include:

• French Grid Day (en français) – 19 September
• GlobusEUROPE – 19 September
• SIENA workshop – 21 September
• OGF33 – 19-21 September
• Grid2011 – 22-23 September

The conference dinner is included in the full week registration fee. This year the Technical Forum dinner will be held on Wednesday 21 September at the L'Abbaye de Collonges. The restaurant is owned by Paul Bocuse, a Lyon-based chef with several Michelin stars to his name. The plan is to reach the restaurant by boat, so you will have the opportunity to enjoy a tour on the Saone River before dinner. If you’re not registering for the full week, you are welcome to add a ticket to the conference dinner during the registration process. More about the conference dinner.

Another activity taking place during the week is a visit to the new 900m2 computer room at the CC-IN2P3. The CC-IN2P3 will organise several visits to this new facility which will offer an even more powerful service to its research community, fulfilling particularly ambitious international commitments regarding the LHC project. More about the visit to the CC-IN2P3 computer room.

On 23 June EGI signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the e-ScienceTalk project, thus formalising a fruitful working relationship that started in September 2010.

The agreement was signed by Steven Newhouse, director of EGI.eu and Catherine Gater, project coordinator for e-ScienceTalk. EGI.eu is the coordinating partner for e-ScienceTalk. “One of the key aims of EGI is to enable access to computing resources for all scientists in Europe and we are working actively to increase the scientific diversity of our users,” says Newhouse. “But for that we need to communicate the benefits of grid computing and this is where the e-ScienceTalk project can help.”

The project brings together the outreach activities of EGI and other European e-Infrastructure projects, ensuring their results and influence are reported in print and online. The outputs of the project are:

• e-Science Briefings, key reports for policy-makers.
• GridCafé, an introduction to grid computing for a general audience.
• International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW), an online weekly newsletter about e-Science.
• GridGuide, an atlas of grid computing.
• GridCast, a blog that goes behind the scenes of e-Science events around the world.

“Our goal is to increase the visibility of e-infrastructures in the wider world and raise awareness of the contributions distributed computing makes to modern day science and our own welfare,” says Gater. “We aim to share success stories and case studies with a wide variety of audiences, from the general public to policy-makers.”

“Our collaboration with EGI.eu will give us access to Europe’s leading scientific grid infrastructure community and we will do our best to let everyone know about their achievements,” Gater adds.
 

EGI signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) yesterday with the gSLM project to collaborate in bringing EGI’s Service Level Management in line with industry best practices.

The EGI project is interested in giving European scientists, and their international collaborators, access to a sustainable distributed computing service. However, the European grid has many stakeholders; resource owners, users, and administrators, and it can be difficult to bring all these viewpoints into focus. Thomas Schaaf from gSLM explains, “Even once you reach agreement on what needs to be done and how, it still isn’t easy. Documenting, managing and policing rights and responsibilities in a fair but enforceable way is extremely complex in an environment like the grid. We hope to help EGI improve their Service Level Management by bringing lessons learned by industry to bear on the problem”.

The MoU, signed at ISC’11 in Hamburg, formalises the collaboration between EGI and gSLM so that the two can work together to provide concrete plans that can help shape the future of the infrastructure. Sergio Andreozzi has been working with gSLM to define the details of the collaboration plan, “Leveraging the experience and the best practices of Service Level Management from the commercial sector is just one more step towards improving EGI overall services. The gSLM project will bring the needed expertise to understand what can be improved and how”.

Some of the most important results of the collaboration will include:

• Defining everyone’s role within EGI in relation to delivering a service to EGI users. This will mean that everyone within the project understand their place within the schema along with what is expected of them and what they can expect from others.
• Creating a list of the current obstacles and requirements that the service providers have for providing services to users. EGI needs to know what are the issues for resource providers, this list will allow them to tackle these problems and hopefully make supporting new users as easy as possible.
• Discovering the obstacles and requirements that existing and potential users have accessing grid services. Solving the problems being encountered by users now will help the project understand what needs to be done to make the grid more attractive to new users.
• Building a training programme to improve the project’s IT Service Management. For EGI to gain from the collaboration with gSLM the lessons learned need to be disseminated as wide as possible. The training programme will do this alongside as explaining the new processes being used by the project.

The activity will start immediately by harmonising the terminology used and planning for a training session on IT Service Management at the next EGI Technical Forum.
 

Last month marked another step forward for the European Grid Infrastructure as they signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Life Science Grid Community (LSGC). The MoU will solidify the relationship between the two, bringing benefits to all grid users.

Biomedical research was one of the first communities, after high energy physics, to embrace grid technology. Yannick Legre the president of HealthGrid, the organisation co-ordinating LSGC, recognises the benefits the grid has had on their work "The European grid has been instrumental in the work we do. We have been able to offer researchers resources that they could usually only dream of, enabling research into some of the most exciting areas of biomedicine. We are really happy to formalise our relationship with EGI and look forward to working with them on providing an infrastructure for our members".

The agreement provides a joint work plan covering; user support, operations, outreach, requirement gathering and policies and procedures. Collaborating on these areas will ensure that the two can work together to improve the services they offer.

Steve Brewer EGI's Chief Community Officer believes that this is an important agreement for the project "EGI is providing an infrastructure for research in Europe. To do this we need to work with every discipline and discover their wants and needs. The life sciences have a very different view of the technology to a group like particle physicists, making the grid work for them will only improve the grid experience for them and others. I am delighted that we have been able to bring that community on-board so quickly. I think it is proof that we have something to offer everyone".

Sergio Andreozzi, Policy Development Manager at EGI, supported the negotiation process and welcomes the final signature "this agreement is another important milestone in the EGI strategy of establishing long-term relationships with diverse virtual research communities, thus expanding the user base and connecting them. More agreements with various actors are nearing the finish line and will be announced in the coming weeks".

• Memorandum of Understanding
• More information on Healthgrid

EGI.eu has moved to a new address!

So far EGI.eu has been hosted by the Dutch Institute for High-Energy Physics (NIKHEF) and has shared a third-floor corridor with astronomers, astrophysicists and the crew from the ANTARES project.

After a great first year in Amsterdam, it’s time to move on - but not very far. As of 3 June 2011, EGI.eu is based on the third-floor of SARA building, home of the Dutch national HPC provider and also in Science Park. Our new address is:

EGI.eu
Science Park 140
1098 XG Amsterdam

We also changed our contact details. The new telephone number for the office will be:

+31 (0)20 89 32 007

The EGI.eu staff will be available from this landline and, as always, by email, skype and mobile numbers. Please check individual staff pages for details.

Before we leave, many thanks to Arjen van Rijn, the NIKHEF staff and the support of BiGGrid, the Dutch NGI, for making us feel at home during our first year in Amsterdam.

We look forward to welcome you to our new offices!
 

The deadline for submissions for the Technical Forum 2011 in Lyon has been extended until the end of this week, 10 June.

The programme committee is still accepting abstracts for posters and demonstrations. Proposals for ther types of contributions, such as oral presentations or workshops, will be considered as space allows.

The programme committee has also started working on the timetable, based on the submitted abstracts - details will be available soon. Registration for the event will open later this month.

Check this space for updates!

Only three days left to submit abstracts to the 2011 EGI Technical Forum!

The Technical Forum welcomes contributions from the European e-Infrastructure community, and their international collaborators, on a wide range of topics including (but are not limited to):

• EGI Operations
• Technology used within EGI
• The support, work and tools of the EGI User Communities
• EGI Policies
• EGI Dissemination
• Collaborating projects

Abstracts should be submitted through the Technical Forum's Indico page until 3 June 2011.

The event will also feature an exhibition area open for organisations active within the EGI community (projects, NGIs, companies) to present their work. In addition, end-users, application and tool developers, operations staff and others are encouraged to participate by submitting abstracts for:

• Sessions
• Posters
• Demonstrations
• Workshops
• Training

The programme committee will review the contribution requests and allocate space to the contributions, which may require different contributions to be merged. Posters will be on display all week during the event and the selected demonstrations will have allocated time on the booths provided. The exhibition area will be open for organisations active within the EGI community to present their work. Requests for co-located workshops will need to identify how the workshop organisers will ensure a high-quality programme that is relevant to the EGI community.

EGI has come together with its fellow Distributed Computing Infrastructure (DCI) projects to organise a summer school to help researchers, and providers, learn about the technologies they provide. It will run from the 11-16 July in Budapest, Hungary.

The event is the first Joint European DCI Summer School, it aims to introduce, and explain, the technologies provided by the DCI projects. The meeting will also address the issues of how to organise production infrastructures based on these technologies and include sessions on porting applications and supporting users.

The school is being jointly organised by the 6 EC funded DCI projects; EGI, European Middleware Initiative (EMI), the Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE), European Desktop Grid Initiative (EDGI), StratusLab and VENUS-C.

For information about the event is available online.

The European Commission is seeking views from citizens, businesses, public administrations and other interested parties on how to fully benefit from 'cloud computing'. Cloud computing enables companies, public administrations and individuals, using networks such as the internet, to access their data and software on computers located somewhere else. It can help businesses – especially SMEs – to drastically reduce information technology costs, help governments supply services at a lower cost and save energy by making more efficient use of hardware.

Cloud computing is already used widely, for example for web-based e-mail services. This trend is growing and cloud services are expected to generate revenues of almost €35 billion in Europe by 2014. Promoting the right conditions for citizens and businesses to best benefit from this technical development is one of the actions foreseen by the Digital Agenda for Europe (see IP/10/581, MEMO/10/199 and MEMO/10/200). The online public consultation will run until the August 31st. Responses will feed into the preparation of a European cloud computing strategy that the Commission will present in 2012.

Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice President for the Digital Agenda, said: "I am excited about the potential benefits of cloud computing to cut costs, improve services and open up new business opportunities. We need a well-defined cloud computing strategy to ensure that we make the best use of this potential. The input we are requesting from all interested parties is important to get it right."

Cloud computing has the potential to develop into a major new service industry, presenting great opportunities for European telecoms and technology companies. Client companies and public administrations can benefit from lower costs and state-of-the-art services by using cloud computing rather than installing and maintaining software and computing equipment of their own.

The Commission is inviting all interested parties, in particular cloud developers and cloud users, to explain their experience, needs, expectations and insights into the use and provision of cloud computing. Inter alia, the survey seeks feedback on the following issues:

• data protection and liability questions, in particular in cross-border situations;
• other legal and technical barriers that can slow down the development of cloud computing in Europe;
• standardisation and interoperability solutions;
• uptake of cloud services, in particular by SMEs;
• ways to promote research and innovation in cloud computing.

The results of the consultation will feed into a European cloud computing strategy that the Commission will present in 2012. This strategy will aim to clarify the legal conditions for the take-up of cloud computing in Europe, stimulate the development of a competitive European cloud industry and market, and facilitate the roll-out of innovative cloud computing services for citizens and businesses.

Links

• Public consultation
• Digital Agenda
• Original press release

The EMI project is pleased to announce the availability of the EMI 1 (Kebnekaise) release.

This release features for the first time a complete and consolidated set of middleware components from ARC, dCache, gLite and UNICORE. The services, managed in the past by separate providers, and now developed, built and tested in collaboration, follow well established open-source practices and are distributed from a single reference repository. The reference platform for EMI 1 is Scientific Linux 5 64 bit.

Kebnekaise will be supported for 18 months, with 6 additional months of support for security issues.

For more details on the EMI 1 release and the middleware products composing it, please refer to the following links:

• EMI 1 Release page
• EMI User Forums
• EMI Software Repository

Last week saw an important step in improving research collaborations between Africa and Europe with the announcement of €14.75M of investment in the AfricaConnect project.

Modern collaborative research requires a stable and robust IT infrastructure. However African researchers interested in taking part in global research are finding that the current state of the available infrastructure in Africa is preventing them from being as active in international collaborations as they would like. AfricaConnect aims to remedy this by establishing a high-capacity Internet network for research and education in Southern and Eastern Africa. This will provide the region with a gateway to global research collaboration, making these collaborations as easy as possible.

The project brings together partners from all over Europe and Africa including the continent’s existing National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) alongside some of Europe’s. They are not alone, the project is being managed by DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe) with its counterparts the UbuntuNet Alliance and WACREN (West and Central African Research and Education Network). These three projects bring significant expertise in providing cutting edge networks and connecting European and African resources.

Over the next four years the project will work on building up the infrastructure so that by the end of the project the African partners will be able to maintain and improve the intra-regional African research network and its direct connection to international networks. The scheme should also accelerate the development of the Information Society in Africa, improving ordinary African’s access to IT and the global network.

The 5th Iberian Grid Infrastructure conference – IBERGRID’2011 – will be held in Santander, Spain between 8-10 June 2011, at the Palacio de la Magdalena.

The event, hosted by the Advanced Computing and e-science Department at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (CSIC-UC) and the Polytechnic University of Valencia, will focus on the on-going grid projects in development by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American institutions.

“The IBERGRID conference has been established as the meeting point where researchers, technicians and developers of the area of distributed computing from Spain and Portugal gather once per year,” says Isabel Campos, chair of the conference’s organising committee.

“The attendance is very similar to that of a user forum – about half of the presentations are devoted to scientific applications running on the EGI infrastructure,” she adds. “Software developers and site administrators also typically come to IBERGRID, which became already sort of a tradition for the Iberian community.”

The IBERGRID’2011 programme is varied and covers topics such as green IT, large data repositories, LHC Computing Grid and Tier-0 topology, interactive supercomputing, applications for high performance networks, ESFRI implementations in the Iberian area or applications for volunteer computing.

This year the event will also include special tracks on virtualisation techniques and its applications, and on advanced management of computer centres.

The deadline for early registration is 10 May 2011.

http://www.ibergrid.eu/2011/index.html

The Spring issue of Inspired, EGI's newsletter, was published today online and as a pdf.

The main focus of the Spring edition is the EGI User Forum in Vilnius held between 11-14 April. Viviane Li closes the curtain on the forum and Sy Holsinger tells us how the policy workshop went. Neasan O'Neill reviews the release of EMI 1 and I bring you a summary of the MoUs and SLAs signed at the User Forum. But that's not all.

Headlines

• EMI: Scaling new heights
• User Forum 2011 wrap up
• MoUs and SLAs: collaborations from theory to practice
• EGI User Virtualisation Workshop
• Project profile: GISELA
• Driving EGI policy
• Operations architecture and latest infrastructure figures
• Opinion: Finding out what researchers need
• The SEERA-EI e-Infrastructure analysis
• EDGI's tool to submit 10,000 jobs to the grid
• Upcoming events
  • Technical Forum 2011 - Call for participation opens
  • Gearing up for IBERGRID’2011 in Santander

 If you want to contribute with ideas, suggestions or stories to the newsletter don't forget to let me know!

At the EGI User Forum, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, the EDGI project successfully demonstrated the use of the new MetaJob feature, which enables user to submit jobs to the EDGI Desktop Grid through gLite using one single command. The new feature can be used to wrap or describe thousands of jobs into one single MetaJob.

“Desktop Grids are especially useful for applications like parameter sweeps where you have thousands and thousands of similar jobs,” explains Ad Emmen, from AlmereGrid. “MetaJob is a command line ‘script’ that helps an EGI user to create these jobs for his/her application, and submit them automatically through standard gLite interfaces.”

The efficiency of MetaJob was demonstrated with great success at the EDGI booth. During the day, the EDGI team submitted 10,000 jobs several times to show the EGI User Forum visitors how this can easily be processed by BOINC, without disrupting the gLite infrastructure.

For Jozsef Kovacs, from the MTA SZTAKI (the Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences), MetaJob makes it easier to handle a high number of jobs. MetaJob also allows “to increase the scalability of the service grid to desktop grid bridging services deployed by the EDGI project by decreasing the load of the service grid components – for example gLite wms,” he adds.

From a technical point of view the solution is based on the well-known Service Cluster Grid to Desktop Grid bridge, where an extra MetaJob description file - containing the definition of a huge number of jobs - is attached to the job as input file. This MetaJob input file is recognised by the 3GBridge component, which then creates the jobs and inserts them into BOINC. This solution also works with XtremWeb on the Desktop Grid side or ARC on the Service/Cluster Grid side without any modification.

This work was performed in the framework of "Task JRA1.5: Solve Service/Cluster Grid to Desktop Grid bridge scalability issues" in the EDGI project.

"This successful EDGI demonstration clearly shows that Desktop Grids can be used effortlessly for scientific day-to-day calculations,” said Peter Kacsuk from the EDGI project. “The relevance of Desktop Grids for e-Science has been proven once and for all.”

The consultation phase for the e-Infrastructures Reflection Group (e-IRG) White Paper 2011 is open and we encourage the whole community: e-Infrastructure users, service providers and policy makers to provide your valuable feedback and reflections.

The e-IRG White Papers summarise on-going discussions around key e-Infrastructure areas and topics that require immediate policy actions, and form the basis for proposing formal e-IRG recommendations at the national and EU levels.
The e-IRG White paper 2011 features the following topics:

• e-Infrastructure governance
• Future of Research Networking
• Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting
• Energy and Green IT
• Exascale computing and related software
• e-Infrastructure services
• Data infrastructures

Note that the proposed recommendations in this version of the White Paper 2011 are subject to change, as they are not yet endorsed by the e-IRG plenum.

Comments should be submitted before the 8th of May using the following e-mail address: wp2011@e-irg.eu

You can find the document on the following link of the e-IRG website. Please note that you will be redirected to a minimal survey page before downloading the document.

You can also contact the e-IRG secretariat: secretariat@e-irg.eu

Virtualisation and cloud computing have demonstrated how new technologies can enable dynamic execution environments or on-demand elastic service deployment with new, clear cost measurements and business models. Today’s ICT policies and services that are tailored to the established e-Infrastructure user communities do not always meet the needs of newcomers. Now is the time for EGI to provide a more flexible, efficient e-Infrastructure to attract new users on a larger scale.

EGI is organising a dedicated workshop on User Virtualisation (12-13 May 2011, Amsterdam) to bring together three critical groups within the European production infrastructure – resource providers, end-users and technology providers. The workshop will address specific questions through a series of user specific presentations and topical breakouts and serves as a follow-up to a recently published report on the integration of clouds and virtualisation into EGI. A technical roadmap defining the EGI cloud profile is also currently underway.

The workshop will deliberately not spend time on technology related presentations or provide an introduction to cloud computing, as there have been plenty of recent activities in the area (e.g. DCI collaborative and SIENA roadmaps) as well as recently held events (e.g. Cloudscape-III).

Discussions will be focused on understanding if and how EGI should move towards providing an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model to support data intensive science and if this service should be provided by federations of resource providers from the research community. Other key topics to be covered include what sort of use (consuming communities and use cases) would the research community make of such a capability and what are the major issues (e.g. technical, policy, governance, etc.) that need to be resolved for this use to happen.

The outcome of the meeting will be a set of critical observations that can be developed into a roadmap that will meet the growing need for virtualised resources from the European research communities.

For more information or to register, as places are limited, visit the event's webpage.
 

As a successful User Forum draws to a close, the next meeting is already becoming a reality.

Steven Newhouse, Director of EGI.eu, opened the call for participation for the EGI 2011 Technical Forum in Lyon (19-23 September 2011), during the closing plenary session of the User Forum in Vilnius. The Technical Forum will be organised by EGI.eu and the Institut des Grilles du CNRS, the French National Grid Initiative.

While the User Forum held this week focused on user communities, with an emphasis on new tools, new applications and user support services, the Technical Forum will review the community's plans and progress towards the adoption of a federated virtualised infrastructure for European researchers.

The Technical Forum, to be co-located with the OGF33 meeting and Grid 2011, ‘will be a great opportunity to learn more about the state of the art of e-Infrastructure in Europe, including standards development and the community’s long-term plans for offering cloud interfaces to our users,’ says Newhouse.

The call for participation is now officially open. The Technical Forum welcomes submissions on a wide variety of EGI-related topics.

The event will also feature an exhibition area open for organisations active within the EGI community (projects, NGIs, companies) to present their work. In addition, end-users, application and tool developers, operations staff and others are encouraged to participate by submitting abstracts for technical sessions, posters, demonstrations, training sessions and workshops.
 

The EGI User Forum has started yesterday in Vilnius, Lithuania.

If you want to know what is going on, the GridCast blog is following the event with an international team of bloggers and you can see pictures of the event and Vilnius in Flickr.

First day highlights:

• Steven Newhouse, EGI.eu's director, signed four Memorandums of Understanding with the WeNMR project, SAGA, the GISELA initiative and StratusLab. More information and pictures coming soon!
• Rimantas Žylius, Lithuania's Minister of Economy, spoke at the opening plenary session and found time to have a chat with the GridCast team (video).
• Last year in the 2010 Technical Forum, Kostas Glinos, Head of the European Commission's GÉANT & e-Infrastructures Unit, presented Steven Newhouse with the EGI-InSPIRE project's grant agreement. Yesterday, Steven thanked Kostas with an overview of the year's project achievements and an EGI pen!

The EGI User Forum 2011 in Vilnius has a packed programme offering a diverse range of workshops, demonstrations, presentations and tutorials with a focus on end-user training. With more than twenty three workshops and tutorials on offer over four days, the EGI-InSPIRE Heavy User Communities (HUCs) shall be playing their part.

Here is an overview of the HUC training workshops:

SHIWA platform

The Life Sciences community will introduce the SHIWA platform, a multi-system workflow execution platform and interoperability solution, supporting Askalon, MOTEUR, P-GRADE and Triana workflows. Workflow environments shield the end-users from the details of the grid infrastructure. The examples used at this training event are taken from the Life Sciences domain, but the tools presented here have much wider applications and should be of interest to all user communities.

• Location: Theta; Time 11-Apr-2011 @14:00; Duration 03h30'
• Abstract

Using a StratusLab cloud infrastructure

StratusLab open-source cloud distribution allows resource centres to expose their computing resources as an ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) type cloud.

This tutorial presents the main StratusLab features and how they can be used by system administrators and scientists alike. They will learn how StratusLab-based infrastructures can be integrated with the EGI, and how the cloud services complement grid services. Practical exercises will teach the participants how to launch virtual machines, customise their computing environment, share those environments, manage virtual disks, and define complete services.

Participants will be provided credentials to access a StratusLab cloud infrastructure and must bring a laptop with python (2.6+), java (1.6+), and an ssh client installed.

• Location: Gamma; Time 12-Apr-2011 @11:00; Duration 01h30'
• Abstract

Earth Science Data Processing Tools and Applications

The Earth Science community has a rich and extensive repository of data stored outside EGI and access to this data during job execution is a mandatory requirement. The Earth Sciences community is also interested in using the OPeNDAP protocol and Hyrax Data Server. Hyrax offers many features that go beyond high-performance access to distributed datasets, such as an extensible component-based architecture, multiple data representations, static or dynamic THREDDS catalogues. Due to the many different technologies, data-centres, standards and pseudo-standards, however, it seems that no general solution can be found. This talk should be of interest to anyone interested in these or similar issues.

• Location: Zeta; Time 12-Apr-2011 @16:00; Duration 00h30'

Shared Services Tools based on the Ganga job definition

Ganga is a user-targeted job management tool designed to provide a homogeneous environment for processing data on a variety of technology ‘back-ends’. Initially developed within the high-energy physics (HEP) domain, Ganga has been adopted by a wide variety of other user communities as their default analysis and task-management system. The modular nature of Ganga means that communities can easily, if desired, develop their own suite of tools independent of both the core code and those of other communities. This presentation will use case-studies to illustrate the ease with which non-LHC communities (for example medical research), have adopted Ganga as their chief job-submission tool.

• Location: Zeta; Time: 13-Apr-2011 @12:00; Duration: 30'
• Abstract

Experiment Dashboard

The Experiment Dashboard applications for infrastructure monitoring are widely used by the LHC virtual organisations for the computing shifts and site commissioning activities. The LHC Experiment Dashboard consists of:

• Site Usability Dashboard, which uses tailored VO tests within the existing Site Availability Monitoring (SAM) system;
• Site Status Board, which allows VOs to construct customised monitoring views;
• SiteView, a single point of entry for site administrators, to understand how their site is used by the LHC VOs and to detect potential problems and ensure effective site performance.

The Dashboard applications are essential LHC computing operations tools. However, they are generic and can be adapted for other community’s needs. The talk will give an overview the Dashboard applications, highlighting the possibility of exploiting these applications outside the LHC domain.

• Location: Lambda; Time: 13-Apr-2011 @16:00; Duration: 01h30'
• Abstract

MPI Hands on training

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) standards and their implementations are currently the most prevalent frameworks on which parallel applications are built. A significant problem in exploiting MPI applications on the grid is the inherent nature of its heterogeneous environments. Different MPI implementations, system interconnects or job managers can be found at different resource centres. In order to run an application, the end-user needs some ‘a priori’ knowledge about the resources. MPI-Start offers a unique and stable interface to execute parallel applications at the gLite based grid sites. It aims to hide the differences and complexities of the heterogeneous systems that compose a grid infrastructure by providing a high-level abstract layer. This presentation introduces the basic concepts of MPI, together with a detailed description of MPI-Start and how to use it.

The tutorial is suitable to all users who wish to adapt their MPI-based applications for use on the grid using gLite.

• Location: Iota; Time: 14-Apr-2011 @11:00; Duration: 01h30'
• Abstract

Kepler

Kepler is a free and open source workflow engine used extensively by the FUSION community. It is designed to help scientists and developers to easily create, execute, share and reuse their models across the scientific and engineering domains. In particular, Kepler includes components that integrate with different middleware stacks (e.g. gLite or UNICORE). Kepler workflows can be decomposed into smaller parts, thus allowing complex tasks to be divided into much simpler ones. This feature provides workflow designers with ability to build re-usable, modular sub-workflows. These can be saved and applied to other workflow. This introductory tutorial should be of interest to all users keen to explore Kepler's powerful capabilities. It will begin by showing how to use Kepler to build basic workflows; use relation paths and synchronisation; and to create control structures such as "if-else" and loops. Finally, job submission, monitoring, and data management shall complete the tutorial.

• Location: Zeta; Time: 14-Apr-2011 @14:00; Duration: 03h30'
• Abstract

John Walsh, Grid-Ireland Operations Centre, Trinity College Dublin

With less than a week to go before the start of the User Forum in Vilnius (11-14 April), the organisers are pleased to announce another three keynote speakers invited to the event.

• Ian Fisk, from FermiLab, will describe WLCG experiences, based on the early results from using their global Tiered data distribution structure (Tier 0-3). These experiences have motivated the proposed move to a cached data model, and he will indicate how this knowledge can help other communities to use distributed infrastructures;
• Tommi Nyrönen, development manager at CSC –the Finnish IT Centre for Science – and the Finnish contact for the ELIXIR project, will introduce the collaborative ‘Hub and Nodes’ structure of this large distributed European project, and the IT strategies and infrastructure it is exploring to support its research community;
• Nick Barcet, from Canonical, will talk about how Ubuntu can be used to create Infrastructure as a Service cloud data centres, and is now becoming a popular guest operating system to deploy in public clouds.

They will join the other two keynote speakers, Steve Rawlings from the University of Oxford and Ruth Pordes from the Open Science Grid, announced in March.

Online registration for the User Forum is now closed, but it will be possible to register for the event at the conference site.

See you all in Vilnius!

This week the team behind the EGI Applications Database launched their latest tool, a widget to allow anyone to integrate the database with their website.

AppDB has gone from strength to strength since its launch last summer including a major upgrade late last year. The main aim for the database is for users (and developers) to be able to find out what is already out on the grid that can be used or built upon for their work. For this the AppDB needs to be easy to use, but more importantly easy to find.

During the initial development of the AppDB the developers at the Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications in Greece focussed on producing a resource that could be easily accessed and leveraged by anyone who was interested. Using standard, and easy to understand, protocols the team made it simple to query, and pull results from, the database. The first place to test the underlying technology was the AppDB's very own website.

Now that the tool was easy to use, how could they make it easy to find? Just put it everywhere. On NGI websites, national lab websites even individual scientists websites. There was a snag, the system was simple to understand and use but the effort required integrating it fully into an existing site would be asking a lot. So the team have developed the AppDB Gadget, a widget which can be placed on any webpage and display a simple interface to the AppDB. In less than 500 characters a website can have a fully functioning, fully customised interface to the AppDB available to its users.

One of the important features of the gadget is the ability to customise it for a particular discipline (even sub discipline), virtual organisation (VO), middleware or even where it was developed. This means that depending on the audience the website is for the gadget can be set up to be relevant to that VO, scientific community or underlying technology.

Marios Chatziangelou is in charge of the team building the AppDB and the gadget, he is really happy with their progress "I think we have done really well since taking over last July. Now with the new gadget the entire community can interact with the AppDB from any website that wants to host it. Also more users mean more testing and comments which will help us build on and improve the AppDB".

The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) invites policy makers, climate change scientists and e-Infrastructure experts to attend its conference on the ‘Role of e-infrastructures for Climate Change Research’. The event will be held in Trieste, Italy at ICTP’s headquarters (16-20 May, 2011).

The programme includes contributions from scientists, e-Infrastructures projects and high-level stakeholders engaged in national and international strategies to tackle the climate change problem.

“The conference is a great opportunity to meet and network, in a unique environment, with policy makers, scientists and e-Infrastructure experts,” says Alberto Masoni, co-organiser of the event and director of research of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy (INFN).

Confirmed keynote speakers include Kostas Glinos, head of the European Commission’s GÉANT and e-Infrastructures Unit, George H. Philander, director of African Centre for Climate and Earth System Science at Princeton University, and Bryan Lawrence, director of Environmental Data Curation at the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.

The organisers aim to give all participants an opportunity to present their results and achievements to the community and they will be accepting one-page abstract submissions until 25 March 2011. Registration for the event is free and it’s open until 29 April.

The conference programme is subdivided in four sessions. Two will cover themes such as climate change modelling and adaptation/mitigation policies. There will also be a session addressing the role of e-Infrastructures in climate change studies and another on long-term strategies and policies in the use of e-Infrastructures in this field.

Masoni hopes that “informative presentations from a variety of experts, coupled with interactive roundtable discussions and a series of tutorials will offer participants a wide range of take-aways from the event.”

The ICTP conference on the ‘Role of e-infrastructures for Climate Change Research’ is organised by ICTP in partnership CHAIN, EU-IndiaGrid2 and EUMEDGRID-Support Seventh Framework Program projects.
 

The NorduGrid invites all users, operators, decision makers and developers to register for their annual conference on ARC middleware development. The event will be held at the Sundvolden Hoten in Norway, between 9-12 May. Online registration for NorduGrid2011 is open until 31 March.

NorduGrid is a collaboration set to develop, maintain and support Advance Resource Connector, a free grid middleware more commonly known as ARC.

“This event is the best possibility to learn about ARC, meet the community, including all the key developers,” says Balázs Kónya, NorduGrid’s technical coordinator. “If your NGI is already running ARC, or is considering some of the ARC services, then this is the best event to attend.”

“The main goal of the conference is to promote collaboration between ARC developers, users, system administrators and developers of other middleware stacks,” adds Farid Ould-Saada, the collaboration’s chairman.
This year´s event is special as it coincides with the tenth anniversary of the NorduGrid collaboration.

The scientific programme will focus on how the challenges of middleware development evolved over the past decade, as well as the relationship between NorduGrid’s ARC and the European Grid Infrastructure’s (EGI) middleware, operations and user communities and ARC in the clouds.

Ould-Saada highlights a two-day technical workshop about ARC developments and an ARC user school.

The event was not planned as a regional Nordic meeting and everyone with an interest in ARC is very welcome to come along.

“Nordugrid Conferences always have a very open and special atmosphere where real discussion is possible among all the players: students, researchers, middleware developers, infrastructure operators and politicians,” says Kónya. “It is our community event.”
 

Cloud computing is at the centre of the latest e-ScienceBriefing, published today by the e-ScienceTalk project.

The new installment, entitled 'Cloud Computing: What's on the horizon?', looks at the many faces and challenges of cloud computing.

The report, part of a series aimed at decisions and policy-makers, discusses the European Union's vision for cloud computing and quotes Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission in charge of the Digital Agenda, saying that Europe needs to be more than "cloud friendly" - it should be "cloud active".

The eScienceBriefing also discusses the different aspect of cloud computing and the differences between the Infrastructure, Platform and Software as Services (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) business models, as well as the use of clouds for science and the importance of standards.

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has been listed as one of “the most active actors in promoting European girls and women’s advancement” in a position paper on gender and technology prepared by the European Centre for Women and Technology (ECWT).

The position paper presents the state of the art of women in technology and provided the backdrop for the Women in Science, Innovation and Technology meeting in Budapest (6-8 March 2011), a joint high-level conference organized by the Hungarian EU presidency and the European Commission’s DG INFSO.

The event highlighted the latest contributions of women in ICT, technology and innovation. The conference focused on discussing new ways to increase female presence in education, research and innovation, entrepreneurship, workforce and leadership roles.

EGI was mention in the ECTW position paper as one organization actively engaged in this goal. The paper highlights the Gender Action Plan and praises its commitment to raise awareness and collect statistics about women’s participation.

Catherine Gater, Chief Administration Officer, says: "EGI.eu is fully committed to promoting the achievements of women in Europe and to attracting talented professionals, both male and female, to drive forward the work of the European Grid Infrastructure. By supporting thousands of researchers across Europe, EGI is a key part of the Digital Agenda for Europe and will help to increase the economic health of the European Research Area."
 

More information:

• The Gender Action Plan
• Inspired article about the Gender Action plan
• Gender Equality=>Sustainability (blog post)
• In Budapest searching for Europe’s cyberellas (blog post)

The 3rd International Workshop on Science Gateways for Life Sciences (IWSG) invites the submission of papers until 1 April. The workshop (8-10 June; London, United Kingdom) will bring together scientists from the fields of life sciences, bioinformatics and computer science.

“The aim is to exchange experience, formulate ideas and introduce up-to-date technological advances in molecular and systems biology in the context of Science Gateways,” says workshop chair Tamas Kiss, from the University of Westminster.

The programme committee welcomes abstracts on various aspects of molecular and systems biology and Science Gateways and Portals, including management of biological high-throughput data, molecular simulations for drug discovery, usability studies of life sciences portals/gateways or integration of life sciences with e-infrastructures, with an emphasis on demonstrations and success stories.

Scientists with little or no training in computer science will not be at a loss. “Science gateways hide the complexity of the [underlying computer] infrastructure from the scientist,” says Kiss, adding that life science researchers are especially welcome: “the solutions presented on the workshop are targeted towards the scientific community and not towards computer experts.

The workshop, hosted by the University of Westminster, will be a multidisciplinary event that provides a unique opportunity for life scientists to meet computer scientists, application and gateway developers who specifically develop solutions for their community.

“Life scientists will learn about the latest products and developments in the area of life science-specific gateways,” says Kiss. “Gateway and application developers will have the opportunity to meet the end-users and collect requirements or establish collaborations.”

• Deadline for abstract submission: 8 April
• More information available at the workshop's webpage

The organisers of the EGI 2011 User Forum (11-14 April) have announced the first two keynote speakers invited for the event in Vilnius, Lithuania.

They are:

• Steve Rawlings, an astrophysicist based at the University of Oxford and involved in the development of the Square Kilometre Array telescope, which will use a distributed network of individual radio telescopes to give the effective capacity of a very large telescope. He will talk about the data processing challenges it will provide for the e-Infrastructure community.
• Ruth Pordes, executive director of the Open Science Grid will discuss some of the initiatives taking place with the USA’s National Science Foundation (NSF) Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program and how ‘Scientific Software Innovation Institutes’ can help the provision of cyber-infrastructures such as Open Science Grid and potentially EGI.

The deadline for early-bird registration has also been extended and discounted fees will be available until 4 March, this Friday.

The keynotes will be only a part of a packed programme of oral presentations. The talks are organised into six tracks:

• The EMI track brings an overview of the new EMI-1 software release, as well as an outline of the plans for common execution service, data and storage solutions, quality assurance procedures and adoption of standards.
• The User Support Services sessions will showcase the services provided by EGI.eu and its partners, as well as the domain-specific services offered by various communities.
• The User Environments track describes a myriad of scientific gateways and portal technologies currently deployed, in addition to applications, tools and programming libraries that can simplify access to distributed resources.
• The Virtualisation and Cloud Computing sessions will give an overview of the technologies and user experiences coming from European and national activities in this area.
• The Technologies for Distributed Computing talks will highlight recent progress in interoperability and challenges in providing federated access to e-Infrastructures.
• The Data Management track reviews the solutions coming from the WLCG community.
   

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), a partner of the EGI-InSPIRE project, has announced that funding for the construction of the ELIXIR infrastructure has been earmarked by the UK’s Large Facilities Capital Fund.

ELIXIR – the European Life-science Infrastructure for Biological Information – is one of the 44 ESFRI projects. Its goal is to support research in the life sciences and to facilitate knowledge transfer to researchers in the medical and environmental sciences.

Professor Janet Thornton, Director of EMBL-EBI and coordinator of ELIXIR, said: “By providing public access to the wealth of knowledge generated by the global research community, we will empower researchers in academia and industry to solve some of society’s most pressing problems.”

“ELIXIR is an ESFRI infrastructure of global significance with probably the largest number of users,” says Andrew Lyall, ELIXIR’s project manager.

The project was launched in 2007 with funds from the European Commission’s FP7 capacities programme and brings together 32 European life science organisations from 14 countries. Now in the fourth year of its preparatory phase, the project is entering a crucial phase: “we are hoping to start the construction later this year,” adds Lyall.

This large-scale initiative will provide the facilities necessary for Europe’s life science researchers to share, analyse and protect Europe’s rapidly growing store of information about living systems.

ELIXIR’s central hub will be hosted at EMBL-EBI in Hinxton, near Cambridge in the UK.
 

Early bird registration for the EGI User Forum at discounted fees ends in 28 February.

The User Forum will be held in Vilnius (11-14 April), in conjunction with the European Middleware Initiative (EMI) Technical Conference. A draft programme for the event is now available.

The programme features four days packed with presentations, workshops, demonstrations and tutorials, starting at 9:00 am on Monday 11 April. The event will cover how users are making the most out of the infrastructure and how the infrastructure is providing support to the different communities.

EMI will introduce its new middleware release – dubbed EMI-1 – during a dedicated track, followed by tutorials and a ‘meet the experts’ session.

In addition to the scientific and technical sessions, the User Forum will feature an exhibition floor with booths, poster presentations and demonstrations of the latest grid applications to science. Examples include:

• The DECIDE project will showcase diagnostic tools available to support medical doctors to spot ailments and diseases
• The WeNMR infrastructure will present its web portals to potential users
• g-INFO portal for monitoring Influenza A on the grid

Discounted rates end on 28 February, although normal registration for the event will be possible until 1 April.

More information:

• 2011 EGI User Forum homepage
• Preview of the User Forum (Inspired article)

The Winter edition of EGI's newsletter Inpired was published today. The newsletter is available online and as a pdf file.

This issue brings you the profiles of

• LitGrid, the Lithuanian NGI and co-host of the EGI User Forum
• the Initiative for Globus in Europe, the first technical provider to sign an MoU with EGI, and
• the WeNMR virtual research community.

But that is not all...

• Viviane Li looks at the programme of the upcoming User Forum
• Carrie Solomon previews the TERENA networking conference
• Peter Solagna unveils the process to gather operations' requirements
• Gergely Sipos introduces the new RT dashboard
• William Karageorgos announces the latest AppDB release
• and Neasan O'Neill reports on the Venus-C open call

If you want to contribute with ideas, suggestions or stories to the newsletter please let me know!

Sara Coelho
sara.coelho@egi.eu

Exactly one year ago, on 8 February 2010, EGI.eu was created as a foundation under Dutch law to coordinate and manage the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) on behalf of its participants, the European NGIs and EIROs.

The statutes of the new EGI.eu foundation were approved in the previous week during a Council meeting and signed by the seven members of EGI.eu’s Executive Board, but it was on 8 February that the registration was made official.

One year on, EGI is a thriving federation of resource providers committed to deliver sustainable, integrated and secure computing services to European researchers and their international partners.

The last 12 months have been very productive:

• We signed Memorandums of Understanding with the Initiative for Globus in Europe and the European Middleware Initiative to provide the software required by EGI’s user community
• We will be signing agreements with Virtual Research Communities to ensure that their needs are represented directly within the infrastructure. The WeNMR Virtual Research Community (VRC) – a worldwide e-Infrastructure for NMR and structural biology – is on track to become the first VRC to join EGI.
• We organised a successful Technical Forum in Amsterdam, which was the first opportunity for the extended EGI community to gather and discuss the way forward towards a sustainable pan-European infrastructure.
• Operations report a significant increase of current jobs per month (plus 86%), users (plus 38%) and active virtual organisations (plus 24%), when compared to April 2010 figures.
• EGI’s operations, user, technical, policy and governance groups have been constituted and are meeting frequently to manage their respective areas of responsibility.
• We have established a set of communication channels with our audiences and stakeholders, including our newsletter, website news and, most recently, our new EGI blog, a place to share your ideas, thoughts and activities with the rest of the EGI community.

This is only the start. We will continue to work hard to make EGI a sustainable and dependable provider of computing resources for European scientists and researchers for many years to come.

On 3-4 March this year, the Software Sustainability Institute (UK) is holding the Collaborations Workshop 2011. It’s a two-day workshop that brings together researchers who use software, funders and software developers. Its goal is to provide attendees with everything needed to create successful collaborations. We want to provide the perfect forum for people to discuss their research and their project’s requirements, and then meet the people who can fulfill those requirements.

Getting people together from different research fields is exciting and terrifying. On the one hand, who knows what problems could be solved and what new research could be started? And on the other hand, how can you possibly agenda a meeting where you don’t know who’s turning up? The easy answer is: we don’t. Rather than relying on a fixed agenda, what we discuss at the workshop depends on the interests of the people who attend. Before and during the workshop, the attendees suggest topics for discussion. At the workshop, we take a vote and only the most popular topics make the agenda.

To kick things off, we’re starting the workshop with a session of lightening talks. It’s the perfect opportunity for attendees to advertise their work and let people know who they want to collaborate with. After the talks are complete, we’ll give attendees the chance to meet up with the people they’re interested so that they can discuss potential collaborations. We’ll even try to get them sitting together at the conference dinner!

Collaboration without funding is difficult, so we’ve invited funders from every Research Council in the United Kingdom. We’re having a good take up from EPSRC, JISC and STFC and we hope to persuade representatives from the other councils to attend too.

If you use software in your research - or want to use it in the future - the Collaborations Workshop is the perfect opportunity for you to meet people who you could work with.

More information:

• Date: 3-4 March 2011
• Location: e-Science Institute, Edinburgh
• Registration website: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/1169/
• Conference website: http://www.software.ac.uk/home/cw11
• Registration fee: £60
• Want to know more? Contact info@software.ac.uk.
   

The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) became the second technology provider to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) on 27 January.

EGI signed an agreement with the Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE), just a few days before.

The MoU was signed by Steven Newhouse director of EGI.eu, on behalf of EGI, and EMI’s project director Alberto Di Meglio.

“EGI is our main middleware customer,” says Di Meglio. “This MoU will make our business relationship stronger and it will help us to accomplish our common vision of providing a reliable and sustainable research infrastructure in Europe."

The EMI project started in May 2010 as a joint effort of the major European distributed computing middleware providers, including ARC, gLite, UNICORE and dCache. The project aims to improve middleware services, closely listening to the requirements of users and infrastructure providers.

“The software from EMI is critical to the reliable use of our production infrastructure by our user community,” says Newhouse. “This MoU identifies the relationship between the two projects for our mutual benefit.”
 

Venus-C has just launched its Open Call looking for pilot applications to get up and running on the cloud.

Funded by the European Commission, Venus-C brings together industrial partners and researchers to create an enterprise-quality cloud service for Europe. To help expand the community they already have, they have launched this new initiative to fund between 10 and 20 new schemes. These pilots will also help gather additional requirements for the platform, alongside testing and validating it. The projects will have access to all of the resources VENUS-C control and be given start-up funds to get the ball rolling.

The expertise at Venus-C will also work with the successful applicants to determine what features and capabilities of Cloud computing best support their work. They hope to attract interest from a diverse range of disciplines including; the Arts & Humanities, Engineering, Health & Life Sciences, Economics, Financial Services, and Natural Sciences. Of particular interest are applications that require dynamic scaling and ubiquitous availability.

Andrea Manieri is one of the coordinators in engineering group at Venus-C and is looking forward to what this means for the project and cloud computing in general “Venus-C already has a compelling range of applications but this open call will broaden the scope of the project, and help ensure the future of an academic cloud infrastructure in Europe”.

The call is open to public and private research organisations and runs from the 11th of January to the 11th of April, 2011. The entire fund is €400,000 which will be equally divided among successful candidates. All Call documents and more information are available online.

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) and the Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) yesterday, 20 January, at EGI.eu's headquarters in Amsterdam. The MoU formalises the continuing business relationship between the two institutions.

The MoU establishes that IGE will provide new technology components to the EGI’s software repository. Specific software provision details will be defined in the future, through Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

The agreement was signed by Steven Newhouse director of EGI.eu, on behalf of EGI, and Helmut Heller, project director of IGE.

“IGE is the first technology provider to sign an agreement to provide software to EGI,” says Newhouse. “Building strong business relations with external technology providers is key to ensuring the long-term sustainability we want to offer to our stakeholders and users.”

IGE is a project set up to support and develop the Globus toolkit and strengthen the influence of European developers in the Globus alliance.

“This agreement is a very important first step to support Globus users in Europe,” says Heller. “And we hope the first of many successful steps in the IGE-EGI collaboration,” he adds.

IGE was the first technology provider to sign a Memorandum of Understanding, but it won’t be alone for long. EGI is set to sign more agreements in the coming weeks.

Bulgaria joined the list of countries fully operational NGIs, as announced in a broadcast to the EGI community on 18 January.

The Bulgarian Grid Consortium manages ten sites, including two large HPC clusters and provides computing resources for more than 100 users. The NGI, previously part of the South-East Europe Regional Operations Centre, was set up a consortium of academic institutions led by the Institute for Parallel Processing of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

“The main usage of the Bulgarian Grid resources comes from applications from Environmental Modelling, Computational Chemistry, Computational Mechanics, Semiconductor Modelling and of course the LHC experiments,” says Mariya Durchova of the Bulgarian Grid Consortium.

The Bulgarian NGI team spent the last two years adding new hardware while moving to a new operational model, adds Durchova, and a few problems related to new hardware deployment were inevitable.

The Nagios monitoring system was the last tool to become operational. Following the successful migration of all systems, the Bulgarian Grid Consortium was the first NGI to become fully operational in 2011.

The Bulgarian NGI team has many plans for the future: “We are currently planning expansion of our current infrastructure in terms of storage mainly and we are also considering the addition of a new Grid site,” says Durchova.

The EGI User Forum will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania on 11-15 April 2011 and registration for the event is now open.

The programme committee has received 154 abstracts, including posters, presentations, workshops and demonstrations. Registration will give participants access to all scientific sessions and to the exhibition area. The fee also includes conference documentation and bag, as well as to welcome drink reception, coffee breaks and lunches.

Participants can register for the event online. Discounted fees will be available until 28 February 2011, but registration will also be possible at the event at full registration price.

The Romanian NGI - the Rogrid Consortium - has joined the list of fully operational NGIs. The news were broadcasted to the EGI community last November.

Alexandru Stanciu, from RoGrid, announced that the Romanian NGI "has finished its integration procedure and that all necessary operational teams and tools are established in our NGI and we are ready for production." RoGrid is visible in all operational tools as NGI_RO and is responsible for all Romanian sites, previously part of the Southeast Europe Regional Operations Centre.

RoGrid was set up in 2002 by the Ministries of Communication and Information Technology and Education & Research to support the development of the Romanian grid infrastructureand make it a consistent and coherent part of the European grid. The consortium has seven academic partners, including the National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics - ICI Bucharest, which represents Romania in the EGI Council.

The December edition of the EGI-InSPIRE Director's Letter is now available at http://www.egi.eu/results/Directors_letters/.

Abstracts for the EGI User Forum for oral presentations, workshops, demonstrations and posters can still be submitted until 24 December. Registration will open in early January.

From all at EGI, best wishes for the New Year!

The submission deadline for abstracts for the EGI User Forum 2011 has been extended to 24 December. Accepted abstracts for oral presentations will be published in the conference's abstract book.

The User Forum will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania (11-15 April) and is organised in conjunction with the European Middleware Initiative and Vilnius University. EGI welcomes contributions from the European e-Infrastructure community, and their international collaborators. End-users, application and tool developers as well as operations staff across Europe can submit abstracts for:

• Oral presentations
• Posters
• Demonstrations
• Workshops
• Stands for the exhibition area

The programme committee is looking for contributions on topics such as:

• Current research approaches or results obtained from using e-Infrastructures
• Domain specific and generic portals that simplify access to e-Infrastructures
• Experiences from applications ported, developed or deployed with e-Infrastructures
• End-user environments (tools/portals/gateways) for accessing e-Infrastructure
• Services or software relating to large-scale data analysis or data-oriented applications on distributed computing infrastructures
• Provision and support for user-oriented e-Infrastructures
• Management and/or exploitation of emerging computing technologies (desktops, virtualisation, clouds)
• Integration, sharing and exploitation of national and international e-Infrastructure
• Delivery of operational e-Infrastructure services to its users

The Cypriot National Grid Initiative (CyGrid) is the latest NGI to become fully operational, as announced in a broadcast to the EGI community on 8 December.

There were no last minute glitches to report: “Everything was fine the last days, with no problems or issues,” said Andoena Balla, system administrator at CyGrid. The Nagios monitoring system, used to test and access the quality of service, was the last tool to become fully operational.

But there is still work to do. For the near future, CyGrid is planning to implement the “migration of all services to glite 3.2,” says Balla. “Also we are planning to buy new servers and provide more resources to our users,” she adds.

Cyprus operates two sites attached to the European Grid Infrastructure and has 13 active users from the fields of Computer Science and Physics. CyGrid’s users run a number of applications listed on their online database.

CyGrid is Cyprus’ national resource provider as well as the country’s representative on the EGI.eu council.

GÉANT turned ten years and Domenico Vicinanza celebrated the event by using the grid infrastructure to create a birthday song (and ringtone) made of all the names of the NREN partners involved in the project.

Vicinanza, who works at DANTE, used a technique called sonification to turn the partners’ names into a musical tune that feels like the soundtrack of a futuristic fairy-tale.

“Sonification, in general terms, is the acoustic counterpart of the graphical data representation,” he explains. “In other words, it is the representation of data or by means of audible information.”

Here is how sonification works: Vicinanza attributed a specific musical note to each letter of the alphabet using the white keys of a piano as a scale. He also assigned duration to the notes – vowels lasted a quaver (1/8) and consonants a semiquaver (1/16). Then, Vicinanza used the data sonification architecture already available on the GILDA infrastructure to run the algorithm.

The final result of sonification depends on multiple parameters, such as the duration of the notes, the sounds and timbres, the musical scale or the set of notes. “Using the grid, I had the possibility to easily experiment with several sonifications, changing all the parameters I wanted and having multiple algorithms running at the same time on the grid,” says Vicinanza.

“With the help of the grid I could satisfy my artistic need of experimenting with sonification procedures, choosing the one more suitable, processing all of the at the same time and then selecting,” he adds. “Without the grid I would have spent much more time in creating the sonification melodies.”

The birthday song was officially presented to the public on 24 November, at the beginning of the plenary session of GÉANT’s symposium in Vienna.

“I really like the result of the sonification,” says Vicinanza. “The melody has some nice regularity, because some of the text own regularities - sonification has the beauty of inheriting them and making them audible.”

The GÉANT birthday song was only the beginning and Vicinanza’s plans are ambitious: “I’ll keep writing more songs, continuing experimenting with sonification and artistic application of grid computing,” he says.

GÉANT's birthday song is available as an mp3 file and as a ringtone.
 

Submissions of extended abstracts for participation in the EGI User Forum 2011 is now open online, The event will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania (11-15 April). EGI, in conjunction with the European Middleware Initiative and Vilnius University, welcomes contributions from the European e-Infrastructure community, and their international collaborators. End-users, application and tool developers as well as operations staff across Europe can submit abstracts for:

• Oral presentations
• Posters
• Demonstrations
• Workshops
• Stands for the exhibition area

Accepted abstracts for oral presentations will be published in the conference's abstract book. The programme committee is looking for contributions on topics such as:

• Current research approaches or results obtained from using e-Infrastructures
• Domain specific and generic portals that simplify access to e-Infrastructures
• Experiences from applications ported, developed or deployed with e-Infrastructures
• End-user environments (tools/portals/gateways) for accessing e-Infrastructure
• Services or software relating to large-scale data analysis or data-oriented applications on distributed computing infrastructures
• Provision and support for user-oriented e-Infrastructures
• Management and/or exploitation of emerging computing technologies (desktops, virtualisation, clouds)
• Integration, sharing and exploitation of national and international e-Infrastructure
• Delivery of operational e-Infrastructure services to its users

Abstract submission will end on 17 December.

The new release of the EGI Applications Database (AppDB) was announced last Thursday, 18 November, by the AppDB administration team. The Applications Database stores tailor-made applications, ready to be used on the European Grid Infrastructure.

Previously AppDB was in read-only mode. Writing access is still restricted to representatives from the different National Grid Initiatives (NGI), who will register new applications and tools on behalf of their team.

The AppDB administration team, based at the Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications (IASA) in Athens, Greece, welcomes new contributors: “if you want to to gain write access to AppDB on behalf of your NGI, please apply for it in a GGUS ticket, by specifying "AppDB write access request" in the "Short description" field, and stating the NGI you represent in the description field below,” they suggest.

• Key features of the new AppDB release are:
• Authenticated, secure write access for users based on the EGI SSO system
• Linkage of EGI application developer and EGI application user profiles with EGI SSO
• Expanded profile pages about applications, tools and people
• Statistical information about applications, tools, and people, with multiple format image export support
• Support for every EGI middleware (gLite, ARC, UNICORE, Globus)
• News feed about latest AppDB activities
• User messaging and system notifications through internal inbox system

The applications database was developed to encourage scientists to use the grid in their research and to avoid duplication of programming and porting efforts across the EGI community.

• Inspired story on the Applications Database (Summer 2010)

The Autumn 2010 edition of Inspired, EGI's newsletter, has just been published online and is also available as .pdf.

This issue covers wide range of stories, including articles on the upcoming User Forum and a profile of the Italian National Grid Initiative. But that's not all.

• Catherine Gater rounds up the e-Concertation meeting in Geneva
• Sergio Andreozzi looks into European policy
• Karolis Eigelis talks about Vilnius, host city of the next User Forum
• Erika Swiderski reveals EGI-InSPIRE's Gender Action Plan
• Neasan O'Neill reports on the CHEP event in Taipei
• Steve Brewer uncovers the EGI plan for User Support services, and
• Owen Appleton, from the gSLM project, contributes the first feature of a series collaborating projects

If you want to contribute with ideas, suggestions or stories do not hesitate to email the editor.

GRNET, the Greek Research and Education Network, was featured in a profile published in iSGTW's latest edition (3 November).

The profile highlights the importance of GRNET, Greece's National Grid Iniative, as internet and computing resource provider in Greece, as well as its contributions to the European e-infrastructure coordinated by EGI.

Links:

• Full iSGTW story

This November the UK´s National Grid Service (NGS) - the British NGI in conjunction with GridPP - will hold the third annual NGS Innovation Forum event at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Didcot near Oxford, UK. 

The NGS has an ever-growing number of users from a wide range of research areas – from social sciences to particle physics.  The NGS Innovation Forum is an annual event which enables NGS users, NGS staff, technical staff from NGS member institutions and other interested parties to get together and hear about our latest developments and to feedback their requirements and comments direct to the NGS.

This year the innovation Forum will feature user presentations from engineers, social scientists and computational biologists who will demonstrate how they have used NGS resources in their research.  There will also be presentations on major European projects such as EGI, ELIXIR and CLARIN. 

We want the attendees to leave the event with new knowledge about NGS developments and be able to implement this in their day to day research.  To enable this we have demonstrations of 5 tools available from the NGS which will be presented in a “walk-through” style.  The demos are –

• NGS User Interface /Workload Management System
• Application Hosting Environment
• HERMES data management tool
• NGS Database Service
• NGS Desktop tools

Registration for the event is now open to all and will close on the 12^th of November.  Attendees are welcome to attend for one or both days of the event.  A full agenda and the link to registration is available at http://www.ngs.ac.uk/events/ngs-IF10.

Following the success of the Technical Forum 2010 in Amsterdam, EGI has opened the call for participation in the 2011 User Forum to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania (11-15 April).

The User Forum will be organised by EGI.eu, Vilnius University and LITENET with the support of the EGI-InSPIRE and European Middleware Initiative (EMI) projects.

The capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, is one of the most beautiful towns in Eastern Europe. It has always been a multinational, multilingual, and multicultural city with traces of Jewish, Karaite and Tartar cultures. Vilnius enjoys a well-developed infrastructure of services and entertainments and is home to a vibrant community of artists, headquartered in the so-called Republic of Uzupis.

The event will feature an exhibition area open for organisations active within the EGI community (projects, NGIs, companies) to present their work. In addition, end-users, application and tool developers, operations staff and others are encouraged to participate by submitting abstracts for:

• Oral presentations
• Posters
• Demonstrations
• Workshops
• Stands for the exhibition area

EGI welcomes online submissions of extended abstracts (not full technical papers) that include a brief overview, a description of work, impact of work, and main conclusions. The website for extended abstract submission will be announced shortly.

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) will be at two major events next week: the Open Grid Forum in Brussels (25-28 October) and the e-Challenges Conference in Warsaw (27-29 October).

The Open Grid Forum (OGF) provides processes and policies about how to develop open software drawn from the grid community. The organisation is well-known for its thrice-yearly events and EGI will be at next week’s OGF30 in Brussels.

The EGI team has a stand in the booth area and will be ready to answer any queries about the organisation. Technical manager Michel Drescher will also be there to monitor recent standard updates relevant to EGI and with potential impact on the EGI’s UMD roadmap. “I’m looking forward to see what’s being done to develop a common language for accounting records,” says Drescher, who will attend the Usage Records Working Group session. 

In addition OGF will see two important meetings of the distributed computing community. EGI will be holding its first meeting of the Technology Coordination Board that will start formalising the relationship between the production infrastructure and two of its main technology providers – the European Middleware Initiative (EMI) and Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE) projects. OGF 30 will also see the first meeting of experts from across the community to start discussing the SIENA roadmap for Grid and Cloud standards.

eChallenges 2010 will be the 20^th in a series of European Commission-supported conferences on e-Infrastructures and distributed computing. EGI will share a stand at the Warsaw’s event with the e-ScienceTalk project to spread the word about Europe’s grid infrastructure. Catherine Gater, EGI’s dissemination manager, will also present a short talk about the organisation entitled “EGI - A sustainable grid infrastructure for Europe”.

The Swiss NGI (NGI_CH) is now fully operational, as broadcasted to the EGI community on 4 October. It’s the fourth national grid to become fully integrated in the past two months, following Hungary and Turkey in late July and the Netherlands at the end of September.

The Swiss National Grid Association (SwiNG) has delegated the NGI role to SWITCH, which also represents Switzerland in the EGI-InSPIRE project.

Switzerland has five sites attached to the European Grid Infrastructure: three running on gLite middleware and an additional two on ARC. The migration to GOCDB did not stumble against major obstacles: “On an operational basis we have always worked together with Germany and continue to do so - so it wasn't a big complicated process like other NGIs have to go through,” says Christoph Witzig, Middleware team leader at SWITCH.

The last tool to become operational was the Nagios monitoring framework. But there are still many open issues for the future, “most notably the support and monitoring of an national infrastructure consisting of gLite and ARC sites,” adds Witzig.
 

The European Desktop Grid Initiative (EDGI), one of EGI’s sister e-Infrastructure projects, is looking for four subcontractors: two to provide infrastructure and two to bring in new application user communities.

The EDGI project aims to extend the work already done by EDGeS (Enabling Desktop Grids for eScience) in connecting gLite based Service Grids to Desktop Grids, out to scientific clouds and Unicore and KnowArc based Grids.

EDGI welcomes bids from organisations that represent user groups with computing needs that require a large-scale grid, and from existing infrastructures that wish to reach to a large user community by connecting to the EDGI infrastructure. The project expects the two infrastructure subcontractors to extend the resources brought into the EDGI infrastructure by the original partners. These can be academic clouds, as well as local or existing desktop grids ready to support applications ported by EDGeS and EDGI.

The two application user communities subcontractors are expected to extend the number of ported applications to the EDGI infrastructure with new application domains. Applicants are also expected to bring at least a matching unfunded effort to the project and to participate in project meetings and dissemination activities.

More information is available from the EDGI consortium webpage.
 

• Update: The bidding process is over and Lyon will host the 2011 EGI Technical Forum

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is now welcoming bids to host the 2011 Technical Forum. The forum will be the third EGI event, following the success of the 2010 Technical Forum in Amsterdam and the 2011 User Forum, scheduled for April in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Bids from EGI-InSPIRE partners or EGI Council members, based in attractive European cities with easy access to international flights and to the event venue, are welcome by 31 October 2010.

The 2011 Technical Forum will take place in Autumn and EGI expects around 400 attendees for the four to five days event.

The event will reflect on the progress during the first year of EGI to integrate different European e-Infrastructures and their resource providers to meet the needs of the international user communities. The forum will also aim to strengthen the links between NGIs and different technology providers across Europe.

The 2011 Technical Forum will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the latest European e-Infrastructures developments and to network with both resource providers and user communities.

More information is available on request.

PL-Grid, the Polish Infrastructure for Information Science Support in the European Research Space, was profiled in the latest edition of the iSGTW digital newsletter (22 September).

The feature-length article chronicles the establishment of PL-Grid on 31 March, as the first European National Grid Initiative to emerge from the former Central European Regional Operations Centre (CE-ROC) and explores the Poland's motivation to secure a leading role on the development of the European Grid Infrastructure.

Links:

• Full iSGTW story
• Inspired article on the break-up of the CE-ROC

The first ever EGI Technical Forum has come to an end at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. The week-long meeting brought together European distributed computing projects and their collaborators in academia and businesses, from around Europe and around the world.

The forum, organised in partnership with BiG Grid, the Dutch NGI, was the first opportunity for developers, end-users, resource providers and decision makers to meet and discuss the continued transition to a sustainable production grid infrastructure for Europe.

“The last week has marked the end of the beginning of EGI,” says Steven Newhouse, director of EGI.eu. “It’s been great to see all our partners from EGI and related projects in Amsterdam, working together to plan a sustainable future for the European Grid Infrastructure.”

The conference kicked off with an important milestone for the EGI community. Kostas Glinos, Head of Unit "GÉANT & e-Infrastructure" in the Directorate General for Information Society and Media, handed the signed EGI-InSPIRE grant agreement over to Steven Newhouse, together with the European Commission’s 25 million euro contribution to the project.

The programme was packed with technical sessions covering all stages of the production infrastructure, operational requirements and policy-making. The main hall of the Beurs van Berlage hosted a lively exhibition area with posters, demonstrations and stands, which included the premiere of the EGI video presentation, unveiled at EGI’s stand. There was ample opportunity for networking and nurture the collaborations that will meet the needs and requirements of the research community.

The next meeting of the EGI community is scheduled for next Spring at the 2011 User Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania (11-15 April) hosted by LitGRID. 

• GridCast blog from the EGITF 2010
  

Kostas Glinos was pleased to hand over the EC's 25 million euro contribution to establishing EGI to Steven Newhouse, Project Director of EGI-InSPIRE.

Kostas, Head of Unit "GÉANT & e-Infrastructure" in the Directorate General for Information Society and Media, spoke at the opening plenary of the EGI Technical Forum in Amsterdam on Tuesday 14 September, and reminded the delegates that EGI is the result of ten years of EC engagement and 100 million euros of funding. The European Grid Infrastructure is now an essential e-Infrastructure and expectations are high for the future.

The EGI Technical Forum 2010 is now underway. It is the first major event within the EGI community, bringing together European distributed computing projects, National Grid Initiatives and grid users in Europe and around the world. The event is hosted by the Dutch NGI, BiGGrid with sponsorship from IBM and Aruba Networks.

You can follow us live at:

• Video streaming
• Twitter
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Gridcast blog

The EGI Technical Forum 2010 is the first major event within the EGI community, bringing together European distributed computing projects, National Grid Initiatives and grid users in Europe and around the world. The event is hosted by the Dutch NGI, BiGGrid with sponsorship from IBM and Aruba Networks.

Register at www.egi.eu/EGITF2010  BEFORE 2 SEPTEMBER to benefit from the normal conference rate, before the full rate is applied.

Keynote speakers include Kostas Glinos, Head of the GÉANT and e-Infrastructures Unit at the European Commission, Alex Hardisty of the LifeWatch project and Paul Strong from the Open Grid Forum.

Some highlights in the programme include:

EEF Requirements and the ESFRI project - looking at the future needs of scientific communities in the long term.

User Training - getting started in EGI, including an introduction to grid computing and a practical demo.

Services for the EGI Heavy User Communities - advice for users seeking an update on the tools, services and capabilities for users from high energy physics, earth and lifes sciences, astronomy and astrophysics

Telling your story - tips for good communication with the media.

The EGI User Community Support Team will also be running a series of sessions describing the range of user support services that EGI provides. The Forum will provide an excellent opportunity for all of those involved in delivering grid-related support at a national level to both learn about what these services are and how they can be integrated into national support services to improve the user experience in each country. The EGI community support team is partly based in Amsterdam and partly distributed amongst various partners. The Forum will provide the first opportunity for NGIs to meet this team and discuss and plan community support issues for the evolving infrastructure.

EGI's newsletter, Inspired, is published today.

Read about the lastest news from the EGI-InSPIRE project at http://www.egi.eu/export/sites/egi/results/newsletters/Newsletter_Summer2010.pdf

Today's headlines include:

• Applications database is up and running
• Central European ROC evolves into NGI
• Distributed monitoring service is operational
• Policy groups have started to meet
• Upcoming Events
• Technical Forum preview

We are keen to hear your comments and thoughts on our new publication - email us at press@egi.eu to get in touch.

You can also follow the project live through Twitter, Flickr and YouTube:

http://twitter.com/egi_inspire

http://www.flickr.com/photos/europeangrid

http://www.youtube.com/europeangrid

You can also find us on LinkedIn and Facebook "EGI – European Grid Infrastructure".

The EGI Technical Forum 2010 will be held in central Amsterdam at Beurs van Berlage between 14-17th September 2010 in partnership with the BiG Grid (Dutch NGI) project.

Registration for the event is now open.

The major theme will be establishing collaborations between the new and the current European Distributed Computing Infrastructure projects.

A draft programme is available and the call for demonstrations and posters is now open.

Key dates and more information about the conference are available at the EGI Technical Forum 2010 page and website.

The availability and reliability of sites in the grid infrastructure is monitored and safeguarded by ROD (Regional Operator on Duty) teams in different countries. This way a production quality grid infrastructure can be delivered to the EGI's user communities. The first EGI InSPIRE ROD teams workshop was organised on June 1st and 2nd. The meeting gathered up 51 people from 18 countries.

As the European Grid infrastructure has been developed and formulated, the ways to monitor and safeguard the reliability of sites has shaped as well. In the EGEE era, this activity was centralised as 11 sites performed this duty for the whole infrastructure in weekly shifts. In the course of the EGEE-III project this activity moved towards decentralisation where the 11 sites monitored only sites in their own region. Now, in EGI InSPIRE, process is even more decentralised as regions split into countries, each having its own ROD team. The responsibility is now transferred to new organisations with new people involved.

A considerable number of the people attending the workshop come from countries not involved in operations in the EGEE project and were new to the ROD work. There was two tutorial sessions intended especially for those new people to discuss the operational procedures and operational tools used by the ROD teams. Other sessions in the workshop included an overview from the COO of EGI, presentations on the Operations model and how NGIs are embracing this new structure, and presentations and discussions of tools used to monitor the resources. There was also a presentation on a new gLite middleware component called Argus which addresses consistent authorization decisions for distributed services.

EGI.eu joined the International Supercomputing Conference 2010 Exhibition at Hamburg, Germany last week. Our booth was the focus for many questions about the European Grid Infrastructure, and EGI staff were on hand to respond and also to gather ideas from the users, supporters and partners. The event helped us to communicate to the HPC community that EGI has been designed and established as a permanent and sustainable approach to ensuring high-quality e-Infrastructure and computing support for the European and global research community for many years to come. Thank you to all who visited the booth and we hope to see you at next year's event!

EGI booth at ISC'10 Exhibition in Hamburg

© CSC - Suvi Alanko

© CSC - Anni Jakobsson

DORII project with its adorable robots were just across the corridor to amuse us and perhaps to steal some of our attention. 

© Stephen Brewer

Stephen Brewer at the reception of the city of Hamburg after the successful Exhibition.

© CSC - Suvi Alanko

EGI-InSPIRE is building relationships among EU-funded Distributed Computing Infrastructures projects. On May 31st 2010 Representatives from the new six pan-European Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) projects sat together in Brussels to get acquainted and to define their potential interactions to produce an integrated strategy on DCI's in Europe.

As a result, EGI-InSPIRE is in the process of defining its interactions with following projects

• European Middleware Initiative (EMI)
• Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE)
• European Desktop Grid Initiative (EDGI)
• StratusLab
• Venus-C

The SIENA project (Standards and Interoperability for e-Infrastructure ImplemeNtation InitiAtive), will provide support to facilitate the interaction in the EU context and externally with similar initiatives.

The beginning of May saw the start of full-time operations at EGI.eu. The results from the first round of appointments were announced:

• Steven Newhouse, Director
• Catherine Gater, Chief Administrative Officer and Dissemination Manager
• Tiziana Ferrari, Chief Operations Officer
• Stephen Brewer, Chief Community Officer
• Rob van der Meer, Organisation Manager
• Sergio Andreozzi, Policy Development Manager
• Gergely Sipos, User Community Support Team
• Els Dekker, Administrative Support Team

All of these will be starting in Amsterdam over the next few months.

The positions of Chief Technology Officer/Technical Manager, and members of the User Community Support and Policy Development Team members are available.

As EGEE ended with 5th EGEE User Forum held in Uppsala, Sweden, the beginning of the new organisation EGI.eu was planned, discussed and described further. EGI.eu had a booth to meet the questions but different sessions about EGI were even more populated. The Auditorium of Uppsala University was full of people 13th of April as the EGI session ran in two different parts to describe the EGI-InSPIRE and other latest activities.

© CSC - Suvi Alanko

Per Öster, the Chair of the EGI.eu Council discussing with EGI.eu employee Rob van der Meer between the busy schedule.

© CSC - Suvi Alanko

People from GridTalk interviewed Steven Newhouse, the new director of EGI.eu. Please see the GridCast's video interview of Steven Newhouse at GridTalk site.

© CSC - Suvi Alanko

Rob van der Meer talking about EGI.eu.

© CSC - Suvi Alanko
 

Bob Jones, the Director of EGEE project gives he's advices to Steven Newhouse.

© GridTalk courtesy - Corentin Chevalier

Following the establishment of EGI.eu in Amsterdam on February 8th 2010, the first meeting of the statutes based EGI Council took place on March 3rd 2010. The main items of business were the approval of the EGI.eu budget for 2010 and the approval of the EGI.eu Terms of Employment. Both items critically important as the recruitment of new staff continues.

The members of the EGI Council (left to right): Michal Turala, Sverker Holmgren, Isabel Campos, Neil Geddes, Dieter Kranzlmueller, Per Oster, Arjen van Rijn (not shown).

EGI Council

The latest version of the EU Projects magazine has several EGI related articles in it including:

• Towards a sustainable European Grid Infrastructure by Per Oster
• The European Grid Initiative Design Study by Ludek Matyska
• Establishing EGI.eu
• EGI-InSPIRE by Steven Newhouse

Enjoy!

EGI.eu was founded Monday 8 February at the notary's office in Amsterdam. The important step to make this possible was taken last week during the 5th MoU based EGI council meeting in Amsterdam. In this meeting the EGI council approved the statutes for the new EGI.eu foundation and elected the first statutes based Executive Board (EB) of 7 members. The new members of the EB signed the papers for the registration in the chamber of commerce (see pictures). At the end of the meeting the council celebrated this step with champagne.

Now that EGI.eu exists, there are positions to be filled in the coming months.