The EGI blog - Technology and Operations category

Integrating Cloud resources into EGI

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 11:32:00 GMT

Cloud computing is an important model that may fit many IT related challenges for which grid computing is not the right tool in the toolbox. Read here how the EGI Federated Clouds Task Force is working towards integrating Cloud resources into EGI's pan-European e-Infrastructure.

Software Carpentry, or the art of software artisanship

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:33:00 GMT

In its day-to-day work, EGI is taking great care of the Grid middleware that is installed in the Resource Centres affiliated with EGI through the NGIs. By testing software updates and new components before is made available for deployment, EGI is maintaining a production-grade e-Infrastructure that is mission-critical for its own success. A Software Carpentry workshop held at the EGI Community Forum 2013 in Manchester may help Researchers applying the same diligence to software that is no less critical to their own success.

EGI GLUE2 profile: we welcome your comments!

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:09:00 GMT

The EGI GLUE 2 Profile specifies how the GLUE 2.0 information schema should be used in EGI. The call for comments to the EGI GLUE2 profile is now open and we solicit input from experts in the EGI community.

The EGI discussion forum is now on-line!

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:54:00 GMT

A new EGI tool comes on-line to support thematic discussions and exchange knowledge among members of the EGI communiy: the EGI discussion forum http://forum.egi.eu/

Three new articles from EGI to the world

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 08:10:00 GMT

Just a quick note to let everyone know about three recent articles published about EGI and EGI's activities in the general press... Federating clouds to aid researchers (iSGTW) - Matteo Turilli, head of the EGI Federated Cloud Task Force, reports on his ...

The EGI Technical Forum - A View from a Demo Booth

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 15:44:00 GMT

Steve Crouch from the Software Sustainability Insitute tells us about his experiences running a demo at the Technical Forum. As anyone who has been to the EGI Technical Forum can attest, it's always a busy time - and this year was no different! As well ...

Federated identity management

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 08:23:00 GMT

During the last decade e-infrastructure communities and their perception of X.509 certificate based access to e-infrastructures has changed significantly. Many of the existing and potential user communities of EGI consider the personal certificate based access as one of the main barriers of uptake. Some of these communities – together with their support teams from the National Grid Infrastructures (NGIs), NRENs and scientific projects – developed various solutions to simplify, sometimes even to completely eliminate, certificate based login mechanism for users. An overview of these solutions is given in a recently published report (Authentication solutions in the European Grid Infrastructure), covering approaches that build on ‘identity federations’. The previous blog post introduced the concept and benefits of identity federations; this post summarises related activities from the EGI community.

Federated Identity Management

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 07:37:22 GMT

In a distributed environment many information service—such as e-mail, library databases, data repositories, portals, grid/cloud computing applications—require users to authenticate themselves. Within a single institute an institutional identity management system can simplify this authentication for the users. Rather than having separate credentials for each system, a user can employ a single digital identity to access all resources to which he/she is entitled within the organisation. Federated identity management extends this approach beyond the institutional level, creating a trusted authority for digital identities across multiple organizations. This blog post introduces the concept and benefits of identity federations, the next post will describe why and how EGI activities from the domain bring benefits to scientific communities.

Mapping out needs and requirements for GPU based computing in the European Grid

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 14:51:00 GMT

The use of GPGPUs or co-processor accelerator devices, such as Intel's Xeon Phi co-processor, over the past few years has resulted in significant increases in the performance of certain applications. With three of the top 10 clusters in the current June ...

Announcing the GridKa School

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 08:06:00 GMT

GridKa School is one of the leading summer schools for advanced computing techniques in Europe and runs from 27-31 August in Karlsruhe.