News

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 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.