Damage control
Are we being paranoid?
After spending a very stimulating week at the EGI Community Forum 2012 I returned to work on Friday morning to find over 400 emails from our VOMS server stating that pretty much all our VO members have been suspended, including myself... Since then the number of emails has probably passed the 1000, many of them from users enquiring what's happening.
Portals & Gateways
Stage setup
Golden Nuggets at EGI Community Forum
Day 1 of the Community Forum was busy in every respect and at the very core of events, Hall 3 in the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics was filled to the brim for the important discussions on Sustaining the EGI Ecosystem lead by Steven Newhouse and Bob Jones. Lesser shows in the shadows also contained many golden nuggets and I was fortunate to listen to a number of these....
User requirements leading the integration of PRACE and EGI operations
At the CF12 this week EGI and PRACE met the user communities whose requirements are driving operations integration across the two infrastructures.
EGI Community Forum - Cloud discussion
Workshop for users: outcomes from the Federated Cloud Task Force
I'm currently enjoying the Cloud Discussion session which is explaining and opening up the work of the Federated Cloud Task Force which has been running since last September. The Task Force was established to take forward the opportunities for running secure virtual machines across EGI's partners, providers and users. The Task Force was given a formal mandate following a well-attended workshop in Amsterdam at EGI.eu's headquarters last May. The key features of this mandate were an 18 month timeframe to deliver a blueprint and a collection of clearly defined proof of concept demonstrators.
Usage and priorities of deployed middleware in EGI
The EGI operations community started its assessment of usage and priorities of deployed grid software to contribute to the discussion of future development and support of open source software for EGI.
Better operational support to international VOs through Resource Centres
How can Resource Centres and NGIs provide better support to international VOs?
RAMIRI - Prague workshop
Three days in Prague gaining insight and ideas for future research infrastructures
The RAMIRI project (http://www.ramiri.eu/) has just launched the second series of learning workshops for those involved in establishing or running research infrastructures (RIs) in Europe. RAMIRI stands for Realising and Managing International Research Infrastructures and the project has a vision of fostering knowledge transfer, network building and the capture of best practice. The widely distributed nature of the European Grid infrastructure represents a new departure for research infrastructures which traditionally have been either single sites or locally distributed. Consequently, I found myself in Prague rubbing shoulders with people running synchrotrons, radar stations, laser facilities and telescope arrays. Participants had arrived from many corners of Europe and represented many professions and career paths from psychologists and lawyers to project managers and linguists. The common interest was the challenge of planning and running international organizational structures to manage large and advanced research facilities be they physical Research Infrastructures or e-Infrastructures like EGI.
Registration open: 10th HealthGrid Conference and 4th IWSG-Life
Online registration is open for the 10th HealthGrid Conference and the 4th International Workshop on Science Gateways for Life Sciences (IWSG-Life) which are scheduled to take place at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam during the week of 21-25 May 2012.
For registration or more information please visit:
http://amsterdam2012.
http://iwsg-life.org/2012
Registrations open for workshop on Integrated Software for Integrative Structural Biology
Structural biologists use a variety of software tools to help their work, from data collection, through the creation of structural models, to finding biological significance in the results. Now structural biologists are targeting mesoscale structures including the macromolecular machinery of the cell. Increasingly often, they combine different techniques in a single large research project, aiming to create multiscale models. This raises the challenge to software developers of working together to create an integrated and extensible toolset that supports a range of experimental techniques, as well as modelling and simulation methods. This workshop will discuss progress towards these goals and challenges along the way.
Seeking new horizons: EGI’s role for 2020
Over the last three months the EGI has been reflecting on its strategy as Europe moves towards the ambitious aims outlined in the European Commission's Europe 2020 vision. Following review and feedback from the EGI-InSPIRE Project Management Board, the EGI Strategy is now available for your feedback and comment.
Operations activity roadmap 2012
The operations activity roadmap for 2012 was one of the main topics of discussion at the Operations Management Board in January. The full activity plan is now on-line.