SARA celebrates 40 years of ICT research infrastructure in the Netherlands

At the end of a week that has included innovation in Brussels and Nobel prize winning physics in Sweden comes a celebration – the 40th anniversary of SARA, e-infrastructure provider in the Netherlands. Our EGI.eu offices are next door to SARA so I am particularly pleased to join them for their celebrations. We are glamorously hosted today by the Hermitage museum in Amsterdam (which I’m ashamed to say I have yet to visit after 18 months in the city). The day is in two parts, a symposium in the morning (involving presentations) and a celebration in the afternoon (also presentations, but with the more traditionally celebratory food, drinks and music as well).

This morning’s keynote was delivered by Marc Teerlink from IBM, who introduced us to ‘supercomputer’, Watson. Watson made history by winning the US quiz programme Jeopardy! in February this year - rivalling the ability of humans to answer questions in natural language. Having watched Watson in action on a video, I’m glad I didn’t take it on when I saw it at SC11 in Seattle last month, it could have been embarrassing. Incidentally, one of the trickiest problems they had to solve was not to finesse the computing but to find a way for Watson to press the buzzer – the finger they constructed for it kept breaking the button. But Watson’s ability to engage in this deep question and answer model could have benefits not just for winning quiz shows, but for example in health for diagnostics. As Teerlink said, with a trillion devices online and 2 billion users, businesses at the moment are “dying of thirst in an ocean of data.” How do you make sense of it all?

Understanding data, or e-knowledge, was a theme picked up by the post-lunch keynote speaker Larry Smart of Calit2 who looked at some of the leading edge applications for supercomputers. Modeling flames, supernovae, fusion, Parkinson’s, earthquakes, water vapour in the atmosphere and renewable fuels were just some applications. “Supercomputers are like putting your glasses on, they make the fuzzy suddenly look very sharp,” said Smart. But supercomputers aren’t enough on their own, you need supernetworks and supervisualistion to mine the data. GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), for example, provides a 10 Gbps pipe for sharing data, and IBM uses multi-stacked screens to visualise it. Supercomputers are now being built that are optimised for eating this ‘Big Data’ rather than for solving equations – ‘Flash’ GORDON in San Diego has several TB of RAM. According to Smart, commercial clouds are overhyped, the future is in HPC clouds, an area where SARA is of course very active.

Dutch company Philips is a heavy user of the BigGrid grid computing infrastructure – of BigGrid's 1.6 million jobs and 5.3 million CPU hours per year, Philips' usage represents around half. According to Emile Aarts of Philips, e-science will have a big future at Philips in the areas of digital pathology, such as digitising and sharing tissue samples, for digital health monitoring and intelligent urban systems, including street lamps.

So it’s a happy birthday to SARA from me and all at EGI. As a person of a similar vintage (shh – keep that to yourself) I’m delighted to see a 40 year in such excellent shape. Gelukkige verjaardag and all the best for the next 40 years!

Nobel prize winner Schmidt addresses escience2011 in Stockholm

Today I am lucky enough to be in Stockholm while the city prepares for the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. Not only that, but I am attending the IEEE eScience2011 meeting which this afternoon welcomed Brian P Schmidt, winner of the 2011 Nobel prize for physics as a keynote speaker. Prof Schmidt of the Australian National University talked us through how astronomy has offered insights into the history of the universe from the very earliest observations by Tycho Brahe here in Sweden in the 16th Century, right through to the biggest challenges for researchers today: the search for dark energy, the tantalising hints on faster than light particles seen at CERN and detecting life on other planets. Prof Schmidt’s own work, which ultimately earned him his Nobel prize with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter, showed from observations that rather than slowing down, the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.

Schmidt’s address today focused on where astronomy meets data. His SkyMapper project, which is currently scanning the southern sky in unprecedented detail has a peak data rate of 1 TByte per day. ASKAP, an array of 36 radio telescope dishes, being built in Australia will generate 2TB per second. This impressive array is still just a pathfinder project for the monumental Square Kilometer Array, which will scatter thousands of linked dishes across the desert (whether Australian or South African remains to be decided). The SKA will pose challenges in connectivity that today we do not yet have ways to solve. Schmidt predicted that astronomy will increasingly rely on IT to make sense of this sea of data, with IT specialists at the core of building new telescopes.

Exciting stuff for astronomy, IT and anyone interested in where we all came from. Prof Schmidt also very kindly agreed to give an exclusive Q&A on his work and ideas for the role of e-science in astronomy to International Science Grid This Week, our sister pubiication. Watch out at www.isgtw.org for more news soon!

Curiosity - not killing the cat, but driving economic recovery

Is curiosity-driven science just philanthropy or an economic necessity? Should funding for blue sky research wait for better times? Making a convincing argument for ‘no’ as the answer to this question was Prof André Geim – 2010 Nobel prize winner for physics and researcher into new wonderstuff, graphene.

Geim argued that Golden Ages follow major advances in technology. The general purpose technologies we all use today can be traced back to earlier advances in fundamental sciences, pre-dating the company that markets them. For example, the innovation underlying the iPod could be said to go further back than Apple. This time lag leaves us emotionally and economically detached from the basic science that underpins the technologies we rely on every day, the so-called ‘disruptive technologies’.

But when you look out for the next big thing, according to Geim the existing pool of disruptive technologies is nearly exhausted – graphene is really the only big thing in physics/materials at the moment. Over the last 10 years, research has stagnated.

Science today means 7 million researchers, 1 trillion dollars invested in fundamental research, about 1.5% of global GDP. In developed countries, about 0.5% of GDP is supposedly spent on fundamental research – but Geim contends there has been a shift in the definition of fundamental. It should mean the unknown unknowns – the research that is done for the same reason Mallory climbed Everest - ‘because it’s there’. By their nature, the results from blue sky research cannot be predicted but potential profits can be colossal. The discovery of the transistor generated trillions on trillions of dollars - but only decades after the fact.

So, what to do? According to Geim, heavily invest in curiosity driven science and particuarly in the right individuals. “The status quo is a slow economic suicide,” says Geim.

Master class in science communication or how to be more like Brian Cox

The launch session of the Innovation Convention exhorted us to take young people seriously - where will the innovation come from if not from them? So working on that basis, young people also need to learn to tell everyone about their ideas effectively, from the general public, to policy makers to their peers.

Hence a master class in science communication yesterday afternoon, with two masters in the form of Claudie Haignere, a doctor, politician, former astronaut and current President of Universcience in Paris, and Leo Enright, Chairman of Discover Science and Engineering, Ireland. The pupils were there to bring their problems and questions to the rest of the panel. Enright started with an apology for not being Brian Cox, well known commentator on astrophysics and ambassador for CERN, who had originally been part of the programme. Assessing the eminent Prof Cox’s appeal to the media in rather tongue in cheek fashion, Enright made the point that the key was probably Cox’s genuine enthusiasm for his subject and his credibility as a scientist. “Good science and good communication may not always go together in your field,” he said, “but if you find the right communicator, it pays off to be sincere, be yourself and get past your nerves.”

As a journalist, he also noted what he called the collapse in the business model for journalism. Staff science correspondents are increasingly rare in the US, for example, where the Texan Houston Chronicle apparently no longer has a dedicated space reporter. Houston we indeed have a problem. An interesting point given the current crisis in the British press surrounding the Leveson inquiry – fewer stories based on phone hacking might leave more space for science journalism perhaps?

Pupil Jeremy Wilks of EuroNews reported that his hardest challenge is to make the science look and sound good for a TV audience. Credibility is key, he’s not looking for soundbites, he needs his featured scientists to talk naturally and honestly about their research. Not to forget also giving air to what went wrong along the way and the problems they successfully solved. Scientists shouldn’t pretend science has all the answers - they need to get across that they, and science, are still learning. Good advice!

An all star cast at the Innovation Convention, Brussels

This week I’m back in Brussels for the first Innovation Convention. It’s a healthily attended event at around 1200 delegates and has certainly attracted some high profile speakers – Jose Manuel Barroso and Maire Geoghegan-Quinn from the European Commission, Silvia Fendi and Viviane Westwood from the world of fashion, executives from Google, RyanAir, L’Oreal and a brief appearance by German Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel by video. Presumably taking time out from her rather busy schedule in France at the moment, she assured us that innovation was central to the strategy for growth for 2020 and wished us all a successful event. If I can drop any more names by the end of the event, I will do!

Barroso, President of the EC launched the event yesterday morning with a call to strengthen the links between research, innovation and education, the three points of the ‘knowledge triangle’. European entrepreneurs need less red tape and solid investment to get the economy back on track. The Innovation Union flagship initiative itself is concentrating on ICT, climate change and sustainable energy, all themes that will be developed further during the event.

Barroso also announced the appointment of Prof Anne Glover as Chief Scientific Advisor to the EC and followed up with the winners of the Women Innovators Prizes – a tough competition won by Gitte Neubauer, founder of Cellzone, a drug discovery company for inflammatory diseases and cancer. In fact, 2 of the 3 prize winners were in the area of health, with the third in clean energy. With this laudable celebration of women’s achievements in innovation, I did wonder why it was necessary to have 3 female hostesses standing immobile on stage next to the trophies – for me, it slightly undermined the empowerment message.

The opening concluded with a discussion on ‘building a global innovation economy’ with executives from Alcatel-Lucent, L’Oreal, Biocom and Fendi, with the VC from Cambridge University. The session was rather skilfully chaired by Ann Mettler of the Lisbon Council. When introducing the speaker from Fendi (designer of the ‘baguette’ bag in case you didn’t know) she mentioned rather wistfully that she didn’t have one yet. I hope one is forthcoming.

All agreed that innovation, often used in the discussion as a synonym for creativity, was a ‘good thing’ in times of crisis – investment rates of 3 to 15% of turnover were bandied about for various industries. Jean-Paul Agon took a more robust line and said that Europe had an attitude problem – we need to invest in young talent, to avoid a ‘lost generation’ of scientists, nurture infrastructure and to be bold. When I asked the panel about the role of grid and cloud computing in the future of innovation, Leszek Borysiewicz of Cambridge University said yes to commercial use of the grid, yes to investment in clouds and watch out for what happens if you don’t pay attention to grid. Hear, hear!

(For a lively overview of the discussions check out Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/search/ic2011gold)

Grids, clouds and world health at SciTech Europe 2011

TinTin might be bringing Belgian culture to the masses in cinemas at the moment, but for me it was another day, another train trip to Brussels… In the next couple of weeks, it might be worth buying a season ticket from Amsterdam to the home of beer and waffles –SciTech Europe 2011, followed by an FP7 information day, and finishing up with the Innovation Convention on 5 and 6 December. Today it was SciTech Europe, an annual event from Public Service Review, this time held in the aptly named ‘Cube’ in Mont des Arts. Slightly reminiscent of the Louvre’s glass pyramid (although obviously a different shape) the glass cube hosted around 150 participants from government, academia and business, all brought together to discuss ways to promote science and technology in Europe.

I was there to host the European Grid Infrastructure booth – Steven Newhouse, Director of EGI also delivered a masterclass on the sustainable future of grid computing in Europe. It’s all about extracting knowledge from the data deluge hitting researchers from the ever-burgeoning ‘internet of things’, among other sources. On the horizon is a cloud for European researchers that will combine public and commercial resources, complementing the EC’s investment in innovation with commercial expertise.

The event closed with a visionary presentation from Francis Moussy, of the World Health Organisation. He alerted us to some scary statistics for diseases such as dengue fever, HIV and leishmaniasis that are still hitting the developing world hard. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected every year by diseases that we in Europe may never even have heard of. Every year new diseases emerge, such as avian flu, adding to the burden carried by health services.

The WHO focuses on alleviating these ‘infectious diseases of poverty’ and is due to launch a global report in January 2012. The report will follow three themes– the effects of climate change on health, the influence of health systems and the promises offered by innovation. One key area affected by these issues is Africa and Moussa noted that when you look at research collaborations in the region, you find a surprising thing. There are many collaborations between African institutions and North America or Europe… but very few between the African institutions themselves. These sorts of collaborations are what EGI is hoping to support in its recently signed Memorandum of Understanding with Meraka, representing SAGrid, the South African computing grid. The CHAIN project (Coordination and Harmonisation of Advanced e-Infrastructures) is also active in building bridges between e-Infrastructures in different countries.

Right now, the WHO is starting a new project on innovation and ageing. By 2050, 80% of older people will live in what are now classed as low or middle income countries. Ageing happens faster and earlier in these countries and heavily impacts activities such as innovation, infrastructure building and business. The WHO will tackle the problem using four approaches: they will map what people need now and what is currently provided for them, create product profiles for medical companies to use as guidelines for developing new products for this market, facilitate technology transfer and create or augment existing Centres of Excellence in these areas for research and development.

As Captain Haddock would say… blistering barnacles, snowy!

SHIWA and e-ScienceTalk sign up to work together

This morning e-ScienceTalk signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the SHIWA project (SHaring Interoperable Workflows for large-scale scientific simulations on Available DCIs). Coordinated by Prof Peter Kacsuk of MTA SZTAKI, Hungary, SHIWA will leverage existing workflow based solutions and enable cross-workflow and inter-workflow exploitation of distributed computing infrastructures. SHIWA develops, deploys and operates the SHIWA Simulation Platform to offer users production level services supporting workflow interoperability. E-ScienceTalk will work with SHIWA to communicate their results through our blogs, websites, publications, social media and events. So we'll see you at the EGI Community Forum in March 2012, if not before!

The sound of SC11

We've just heard some exciting news from our friend Domenico Vicinanza who's over at the Supercomputing, SC11 conference in Seattle.

If you don't know him already, Domenico's the man behind the Lost Sounds Orchestra, which used grid computing to simulate the sounds of ancient instruments that had long been forgotten. He also works on turning
pretty much anything into music, via a process he calls sonification.

So what exactly is sonification? Well essentially sonification takes data, and maps it into music. For example letters can be mapped to notes, meaning the sentence 'Cats are fluffy' could be expressed musically as:

Domenico is now planning to turn a whole series of tweets into music, live from the SC11 conference later today. And you can get involved. If you're on twitter simply tweet a message with the hashtag #SC11 between 11am – 12 noon PST and it will be used to create the performance. We can't wait!

Cracow Grid Workshop 2011 - CGW2011

I have just returned from a very stimulating and rewarding three days at the 2011 Cracow Grid Workshop. Apart from discovering that Cracow is further South than Prague, just, I also learnt more about grid-related initiatives that relate to the Polish research community. I was pleased to see a good turn out to all the sessions, to see a wide age range with a strong new generation embracing distributed computing and, most importantly, an attentive and questioning audience.

The ongoing discussion about cloud versus grid computing paradigms surfaced in a number of areas with a clear dominance for the cloud model. Personally, I find this interesting but feel that it should not become the dominant debate. As we continue to embrace virtualisation as a mechanism for introducing greater flexibility to the way in which services are delivered we should be able to concentrate on delivering the right services to the right researchers rather than having philosophical discussions about infrastructure.

The other keynotes and talks covered a diverse spectrum of research areas. A number of talks presented WLCG and the Polish contribution to LHC work. Life Sciences was well represented too both at the level of the Life Sciences Grid Community (LSGC) which has been working closely with EGI over the last year and also we heard from the Virtual Physiological Human community. A number of other EU-projects with significant Polish involvement such as UrbanFlood and also the International Desktop Grid Federation were also featured.

Having been fortunate enough to be invited to participate in the jury to judge the posters I had the opportunity, not to say obligation, to study them in some detail. The standard was high so I felt that I came away feeling that I had acquired a good overview of activity in Poland. Posters are important and well worth the effort that goes into producing them; they are a wonderful source of information for others and an opportunity for researchers to rethink the goals and purpose of their research. We at EGI should make more use of these - perhaps more competitions and bigger prizes at our forums?

The strongest message that I took away from CGW11 was that whilst there is much good work being done, too many projects are not working in a sustainability-focused way. Within the context of EGI as a whole we have been promoting the move to a tiered approach modelled on the cloud paradigm with the intention of clearly separating the layers of infrastructure, core middleware services and then user services at the top. Many of the projects that I saw were re-creating elements from all of these layers. Whilst this works at a proof of concept level and enables research to be done in the short term; in the medium term the costs for sustaining all of the elements are high. EGI, that is the organisation EGI.eu in conjunction with the relevant NGIs, need to analyse these successful projects and identify the key elements and migrate these to the relevant tiers in the infrastructure. Typically, there will be elements that already exist and so we can then focus on the original elements with the greatest potential for impact in the research domain and add these to the production infrastructure.

I am pleased to report that the workshop included a wonderful conference dinner at a characterful micro-brewery restaurant in the old city in the centre of Cracow. Always a useful opportunity to push forward discussions from the earlier sessions as well as learn more about the rich history of this fascinating part of Europe from the local hosts.

Collaborative work and the Cloud

On Tuesday 11th October 2011, the Aristote association held a seminar on "Collaborative work and the Cloud" at École Polytechnique in Paris, France. The seminar was organized by Drissa Houatra (Orange Labs) and Philippe d'Anfray (CEA).

This day was a perfect opportunity to see very diverse presentations centered on the concept of collaboration.

Africa in Florence

It's time for the last video from eChallenges!

One of the things we liked best about the conference is the high representation from African countries who are looking onto partnering with European organisations to on new projects for their countries. We grabbed Lieketseng Tjokotsi of the department of Science and Technology in Lesotho to find out why she was at eChallenges and what she hoped to get out of the conference.

Introducing Impact

Hildelies Balk works at the National Library of the Netherlands, where she's looking into digitising the massive amounts of historical material they have to offer. It's a tough task and one the Impact project is hoping to beat. Hildelies tells us more below.

EuroRIs-net: The one-stop shop for research

And here comes video number two..

This time it's care of Wieslaw Studencki who had the exhibition stand next to us at eChallenges. Wieslaw is from EuroRIs-Net which is a network for all the research infrastructures in Europe - be that telescopes, synchotrons or grids. EuroRIs-Net is hoping to be the one-stop shop for researchers who need access to such facilities so you can just pop along to them and they can tell you who to get in contact with.

Thanks for talking to us Wieslaw! (We're sorry about the siren :S )

What's in Pandora's box?

The GridCast team are back in the office following our trip to Florence and, as promised, we still have lots of goodies left over from eChallenges.

First up is the following interview with Sara Grilli of the Pandora project. Pandora has been set up to give crisis managers training, so they know how to react if disaster should actually strike. It's pretty cool, and can even change the training situation depending on how stressed out a trainee is (they monitor things like trainee heart rates to find out). Anyway watch below to hear Sara tell you more.

Art, culture and ICT

Florence is a city well-known for its art and culture, a topic that has been the focus of some of the sessions here at eChallenges.

Yesterday afternoon, we heard how ICT is playing a part in our digital libraries and cultural heritage. You can read more about some of the talks over at the EGI blog, care of Sara Coelho. We’ve also got a video interview with Hildelies Balk, of the Impact project, coming up next week.

In fact we’ve been very busy talking to the delegates here at eChallenges over the last couple of days. We’ve heard about the Pandora project, which is providing online crisis management, we’ve spoken to some of the African delegates about the importance of working with European researchers and we’re discussed the importance of making Europe’s e-Infrastructures better known with our neighbours here in the exhibition area. Although eChallenges is ending today, we've still got more for our GridCast readers so stick with us.

Welcome to eChallenges

We’ve just arrived in the beautiful city of Florence for this year’s eChallenges event.

Although the weather is not the best (umbrellas are a must-have item) it looks like it’s shaping up to be a pretty busy conference. We’ve already had quite a few visitors over to the EGI/e-ScienceTalk stand to find out more about grids can help researchers in their country, and we’ve been doing our best to spread the e-science word.

The sessions today have covered a range of topics. eGovernance is quite a big topic so this morning’s plenary started off with how Florence and Tuscany are trying to use ICT to provide services to their citizens. Later on Klaus-Peter Eckert continued the discussion with a talk on how Germany is using cloud computing in the public sector. Eckert said that instead of migrating existing applications onto the cloud, a better way of demonstrating their benefits would be to start with novel applications to show that certain services can be provided in better, more secure, innovative ways.

Cloud computing is a bit of a buzz word nowadays, along with ‘smart’ – the topic of Julia Glidden’s presentation. Glidden spoke about how smart cities and living labs can drive innovation. Living labs bring together SMES, citizens and public administrators to design products and services. They take the model of product innovation and apply it to public services. However challenges so far tend to include that outcomes are hyper local, which don’t get shared across Europe and are non-scalable.

Anyway that’s just a taster of the conference so far. We hope to bring you much more over the next couple of days, so stick around! (We’re afraid the conference internet is not quite up to uploading videos but we promise to put them up as soon as we’re back.)

Reflecting on e-IRG: Innovation and Grand Challenges

Last week, I was at this year’s second e-IRG workshop in the picturesque polish town of Poznan. It was an action-packed two days as delegates presented and debated best practices and policies for e-infrastructures. Opportunities for ‘joining forces’ were promoted through sharing information, and we heard from a number of ESFRI cluster projects (BioMedBridges, CRISP, DASISH, ENviro, EuroAgro and ITER) as well as data infrastructure projects (EUDAT and OpenAire).

Opening the session was Kostantinos Glinos, Head of Unit Head GEANT and e-infrasturctures, DG INFSCO, who presented some of the possible actions from Common Strategic Framework actions (2014-2020). In the next few years, as e-infrastructures move away from a purely technical arena towards an infrastructure of services a broader initiatives and a wider range of skills and policies will be required. One of the new focuses is likely to be around fostering the RI innovation potential and their human capital.

Developing research e-infrastructure policies across national boundaries is especially important for progress, and this is what one project, e-INFRANet, is currently doing. So far, nine EU countries are involved and three core policy areas have been identified: clouds computing (not surprisingly), green issues and openness. Check out http://e-infranet.eu/ for information on their next workshop on 'The Open Agenda'.

I also heard about a relatively new policy development project called SIM4RDM ERANE. Six EU partners aim to provide a framework to enable researchers to use emerging technical infrastructures effectively. Answering questions such as: What are the bottlenecks for data management? What needs to happen within universities? Do we need new facilities and data management roles within universities? The findings from this project will feed into advising on data management policy for research infrastructure.

After a gala meal of traditional polish meal of goulash soup, a fish called Zander and pickled tangy cucumbers, I slept soundly, ready for a full day of discussion. Subjects tackled on the second day included how best to serve the user communities and also debate around the expanding role of e-IRG.

One talk, focussing on sustainability of e-infrastructure (which is my personal interest), highlighted some of the parameters to examine in building an open sustainable ICT research infrastructure. The research from the University of Brussels could provide those with an interest in examining sustainability with a useful model. Findings from this policy development project will be available at the end of the year at http://www.osiris-online.eu/.

Andrew Lyall from ELIXIR, spoke about BioMedBridges, an important project that will serve a large-scale user communities needs (over 3 million people). It is a consortium, formed by 21 partners (including EMBL) that will construct a common e-infrastructure to allow interoperability between data and services in the biological, medical, translational and clinical domains. Providing secure, robust and ethical access to data for a wide range of users will be the major effort of the project which starts in January 2012.

Immerse yourself in a virtual world. Introducing ‘e-ScienceCity’!

The team at e-ScienceTalk are delighted to announce the launch of our new virtual e-ScienceCity island at www.e-sciencecity.org.

Building on the success of the GridCafé website which introduced people to the world of grids, we have built an interactive space where you will be able to discover more about grids in addition to exploring content on supercomputers, volunteer computing and clouds. The new virtual e-ScienceCity island is part of an OpenSim pilot, to create and evaluate a virtual venue dedicated to e-science and e-learning. In the upcoming months, e-ScienceCity will also be available in an enhanced 3-D design as part of New World Grid (open source version of Second Life).

We’d really like your input into developing our e-ScienceCity. The island is still under construction and we would like to make the journey through the site as enjoyable, helpful and informative as possible to new avatars. If you have any suggestions for content please do email us at info@e-sciencetalk. What do you think you might find in an e-ScienceCity?

The first area of the virtual world to be inhabited is CloudLounge which provides a description of the technologies and issues surrounding cloud computing. For those who would like to contribute your own desktop power there’s also a volunteer garage (currently populated with our latest e-ScienceBriefing, desktop grids). You can climb up our HPC Tower to find out about supercomputers. The latest e-infrastructure news will also be broadcast at the island’s Communication Centre and a forum has been created to help encourage debate on issues relating to e-science infrastructure. Please do share with us your ideas!

Hello to EUDAT, the EGI of data?

GridCast wants to say a big hello to the newly launched EUDAT project. EUDAT has been funded by the European Commission to provide an e-infrastructure to handle the massive amounts of data coming out of today's science -  it's quite a big task!

According to their website EUDAT aims to 'provide Europe’s scientific and research communities with a sustainable pan-European infrastructure for improved access to scientific data. Burgeoning volumes of valuable and complex data – newly available from powerful new scientific instruments, simulations and digitization of library resources – represents a fantastic opportunity for science, but has created new challenges related to data management, access and preservation. EUDAT aims to address these challenges and exploit the opportunities using its vision of a Collaborative Data Infrastructure.'

Hopefully in the future EUDAT's work will lead to a data infrastructure to complement the grid infrastructure provided by EGI and GÉANT's network infrastructure.

If you'd like to contribute to EUDAT's work you will be able offer your opinions through the EUDAT user forums as well as the Data Access and Interoperability Task Force. Check out their website for more info.

Exploit That R&D!

My colleagues and I have charted up several years experience exploiting R&D projects that our company is involved in. In many of the projects we found that the process would start well, the market was analysed, the competitors charted, the USPs of our project results neatly identified, and so on. However we found that common to most of the projects was a point where we didn’t know what to do next. If we had had a business model for delivering a clear value proposition then fine, we could have proceeded to develop business plans for taking it to market. We would have run our best and worst case scenario analysis, totted up our financial sums and had some nice ROI figures. But HOW was the problem. How should this technology be provided? Where is the business? We have a consolidated result, some clever technology, unique in the world, but how do we move from collaboratively building something to practically selling it? “Open source” I hear someone shout. “In a cloud” someone else calls out. It seems that often at this point in the exploitation process, standard practice is to pick the best candidate from a list of contender models. A pragmatic solution perhaps, but one that overlooks many of the more subtle or innovative models. What is more, it’s an approach which lacks a unifying principle to allow each model to be reduced to the raw differences which separate them.

So over the last year or so, we realised that we had unintentionally been developing a technique do deal precisely with that big hurdle. The technique uses a value chain to generate business models from scratch, consequently providing both a common basis for comparisons and an exhaustive breakdown of the options. Although still fairly new, variations of this bottom-up technique have been used in several projects to date with good results and it was felt that it was stable enough to describe in a whitepaper and to share it with the community. Moreover when this technique was formalised during the writing phase, it was applied to existing businesses such as LinkedIn and Facebook, the iPhone and Canonical, and was seen to also be a viable technique for classifying the models of existing companies. The results are explored in a forthcoming paper at the e-challenges conference later this month. The whitepaper itself was presented last week at the Internet of Services collaboration day in Brussels, and is available free of charge at scribd. Funnily enough, as a consequence of the presentation, Jennifer Zaino from semanticweb.com then contacted me and we had an interesting chat about some exploitation best practices in general in the context of R&D projects.

So all in all, it’s been a busy few days! For more information on this check out the whitepaper and accompanying presentation on scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/66506762/From-Value-Chains-to-Business-Models and http://www.scribd.com/doc/66408751/Identification-of-Business-Models-Through-Value-Chain-Analysis-A-Method-for-Exploiting-Large-Technology-Projects-A-Whitepaper.

OpenStack in Action! - Paris, France

Last Wednesday was held a one-day event about OpenStack organized by Rackspace, UShareSoft and eNovance. OpenStack is a rising open-source Cloud framework.

The project was started last year and succeeded in gathering a vibrant community and getting support from companies. It is interesting to note that OpenStack is entirely community-driven: no "self-appointed dictator for life" nor "leading industrial sponsor".

The event was structured around various presentations by the OpenStack community. The first speaker was OpenStack founder Vishvananda "Vish" Ishaya who presented the project (how it started, its architecture and gouvernance), followed by Thierry Carrez (OpenStack Release Manager) who dived into the internals of OpenStack. Dell presented their contribution to OpenStack, including Crowbar, an open-source deployment solution for OpenStack, and their new all-inclusive, turnkey OpenStack commercial package.

OpenStack will be the core of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 Cloud solution, Canonical presented their OpenStack orchestration solution "Juju". Talks from eNovance and UShareSoft were more geared towards best practices for Cloud-infrastructure management and sharing. Clouds bring more flexibility but they also change the way we manage computing infrastructures: when a node is down, you just migrate the service to another node (hence the Cloud motto: "replace, then repair"). eNovance announced the upcoming beta of the first commercial OpenStack offer in Europe.

Haïkel Guémar is software engineer at SysFera, and a veteran Fedora contributor. He is interested in Cloud computing and the new challenges it brings to manage large infrastructures.

e-IRG in Poland

Now that the Technical Forum is over it's time to start looking towards what's coming up next.

In just a few weeks time e-IRG are hosting their biannual workshop in Poznań, Poland and you're all invited to attend.

The e-IRG workshops serve as open forums to present, debate, and consolidate best practices and policies for e-infrastructures and their services for research and education. The workshops are open to all, and function as incubators for feeding new information and trends into e-IRG work.

The Poznań workshop will focus on political, financial and international aspects of e-Infrastructure as well as how to develop and fund sustainable international and multidisciplinary e-Infrastructures. Expert panels will also discuss how to integrate data infrastructures with existing grid and HPC infrastructures.

For more information on registration and the agenda of the e-IRG workshop visit the e-IRG website or email the e-IRG secretariat.

EGI Technical Forum 2011 - What I Bring Back Home

It has been a very intense week in both planned activities and side discussions who happened along this very rich event.

• EGI Policy Development Workshop: this is the second workshop that we organised to engage stakeholders on policy matters in the context of EGI. We reported on the recent developments in both strategic, operational and technical policies in EGI. We also provided insights on Horizon 2020 (the future 2014-2020 EU funding program on research and innovation) and Structural Funds. They both are important tools that the EC will use to implement the Europe 2020 strategy (mainly the Digital Agenda for Europe and Innovation Union). The EGI partnership and individual NGIs should closely monitor these funding opportunities,  align their strategies and prepare clear messages on how e-infrastructure can have long-term socio-economic impact through the results that researchers can achieve using them. K. Glinos, Head of the GEANT & e-Infrastructures Unit of the EC attended the session and provided useful insights, especially on how structural funds will evolve (more open to projects aiming at service provision and  cross-country cooperation). The future workshop to be held at the next EGI Community Forum will focus more on NGIs policy development, the goal will be to gather experience from the most mature NGIs and share status and best practices with the developing ones.
• EGI Sustainability and Business Models: the organisation of this workshop was very demanding but the participation and discussion was rewarding. The preparation started back in June with a survey submitted to all NGIs/EIROs. From the survey results, it was clear that there is a lot to develop in the area of business model design, that is why we proposed an educational section trying to set a common ground on business models discussion. We decided to adopt the Business Model Canvas as a tool that facilitates a focused discussion on the matter while enabling also explorations and reuse of successful patterns. The sustainability aspect of the EGI ecosystem was touched from different viewpoints: NGI (presentation from German NGI), User Community (WLCG), Technology Provider (EMI) and EGI as a whole. We will publish a short report on the workshop.
• e-Fiscal Project Workshop: the e-Fiscal project, formally kicked-off last 1st August, was presented and the preliminary draft questionnaire to collect data from EGI and PRACE sites on actual costs covering 2010 and 2011 was discussed. The invited panelists and the audience agreed that the balance found in the current draft is good, enabling to collect meaningful data to evaluate the cost of e-infrastructures while not overkilling those who need to provide the answers. One of the raised questions was about reusing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) methodologies. It was clarified that the project focus is on actual costs already payed, while TCO is related to cost projections to support selection among alternative solutions.
• Towards an effective e-Infrastructures impact assessment: the ERINA+ project presented a revamped methodology to evaluate the socio-economic impact of e-infrastructures and research projects and a web tool enabling self-evalution will be released later in January. The number of questions to e-infrastructures have been narrowed down to 20 while research related projects will be addressed to understand their perceived impact on the usage of e-infrastructures related to their ability to achieve faster, newer results in their work.
• Tutorial: Towards better managed Grids. IT Service Management best practices based on ITIL: as part of the MoU signed with EGI.eu, the gSLM  project organised an excellent tutorial introducing to the community ITIL, ISO 20000 and CobiT. The room was overcrowded, a sign of how high is the interest in learning and re-using best practices to improve the service life cycle management or the IT governance. Definitely, more work needs to be done, that is why as part of EGI.eu I strongly supported the engagement with gSLM and looking forward for more closer cooperation.
• Signing two new agreements: during the conference, we finalised two new collaboration agreements. The first one with the SIENA project to collaborate on standardisation roadmaps for Grids and Clouds. The second one with the Meraka Institute (South Africa) to formalise the inclusion of resource centres of South Africa within EGI. We also had informal discussion to define details of upcoming agreements (with the DANTE organisation, the e-nventory project, the EDGI desktop grid, and the Digital Cultural Heritage user community).

Besides these planned activities, I had many side discussions and short meetings (e.g., finalising the long standing mapping of the GLUE information model into the XML Schema). 

Overall the conference was very rich and fruitful and I hope that all participants are bringing back home useful results. Sometimes it was hard to choose among parallel sessions, but this is little price to pay in a dynamic and effervescent event. So, these are the main results that I bring back home.How was your experience at the conference?

Touring the CC-IN2P3

On Monday, we spoke to Dominique Boutigny, Director of the CC-IN2P3. This morning, I went on a tour of the facility with Dutch delegates from the conference. The tour was facilitated by Xavier, system administrator, who gave us an extensive tour of the Tier 1 facility.

We saw the 900m² modular room being prepared to accommodate the predicted extra storage capacity. The facility also provides hot water to the new campus restaurant close to CC-IN2P3, and a 24 m³ innovative water cooling is planned for the roof!

Agnes Szeberenyi on KOPI application

Agnes Szeberenyi, from MTA SZTAKI, talked to Manisha Lalloo about the application KOPI and how it's set to make copying your essays from Wikipedia much much harder.