News in Brief
The EGI blog is looking for contributors
Sara Coelho
The EGI blog was created to be a place to share ideas, thoughts and activities and is part of the on-going developments to improve communication with the rest of the community.
The blog is public and after logging in with your EGI SSO you will be able to comment on any of the material. If you want to contribute to the blog, please email blog-admin@egi.eu with your SSO username.
The team at EGI.eu have been posting a few entries on the latest developments on the user community support, the LifeWatch project kick-off event and the challenges waiting for us in 2011.
We all welcome your feedback and we hope your comments will fuel productive online discussions across the many areas of activity within the community.
Venus-C Opens Clouds for research
Neasan O'Neill
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 experts 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 the 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 11 January–11 April, 2011. The entire fund is €400,000 which will be equally divided among successful candidates.
South-East Europe Regional Operations Centre closes the door
Sara Coelho
After more than five years of work, the South-East Europe Regional Operations Centre (SEE-ROC) has stopped its operations on 31 January and is now decommissioning its tools. This marks an end to an era for the South East Europe Region that collaborated closely since the first Enabling Grids for E-Science project (EGEE I) in 2004. “It was a fruitful experience that incubated collaboration within the region and spawned off a number of NGIs,” says Kostas Koumantaros, from Greece’s Hellasgrid.
Having multiple National Grid Initiatives instead of one centralised ROC “allows each NGI to plan individually the upgrades of its infrastructure and possibly minimises administrative effort due to reduced complexity,” explains Koumantaros.
SEE-ROC’s dismantlement follows the closing down of the Central European ROC, which stopped operating on 31 July 2010. “The most important outcome from the collaboration within the SEE-ROC is the establishment of a vast human network,” says Koumantaros. This potential will be maintained through collaborative Regional Virtual Organisations.
Feedback
If you would like to contribute to this section with news about your project, meeting or NGI, please email Sara Coelho
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