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Friday, September 26, 2008

Farewell to Istanbul

It’s the end of this year’s conference – the final slide has been shown, the last coffee drunk and the concluding session wrapped up. The Harbiye Askeri Museum has played host to 545 participants from 50 countries who have between them delivered 285 talks across 5 conference themes. An outstanding range of posters covering topics from high energy physics to bioinformatics to middleware development have been displayed and as ever the annual best poster competition was a closely fought contest. Winner this year, as voted for by the conference delegates was by Javier Rojas Balderrama, presenting “NEUROLOG: Neuroscience Application Workflows Execution on the EGEE Grid. Congratulations!

This year’s demo competition was judged by the External Advisory Committee who were looking for excellence in two categories: best infrastructure demo and best application demo. Runner up in the first category was “EDGeS: Desktop grid extension of the EGEE infrastructure” from Peter Kacsuk’s team. Taking the title was the “EGEE Application Porting Support Group” presented by Gergely SIPOS. The judges were particularly impressed by the speed with which this group has got up and running in just a matter of months since the start of EGEE-III, designing the application, porting it and now training other teams.

Turning to best application demo, runner up was “Grid-Enabled Virtual Screening Service based on Grid Application Platform” from Mason HSIUNG, Lee HURNG-CHUN, Ueng WEI-LONG, Chen HSIN-YEN, Eric YEN and Simon LIN. Winner of this category however was “G-RISICO: A Wild Fire Risk Assessment application running on an advanced Grid infrastructure” by Marco VERLATO, Paolo MAZETTI, Valerio ANGELINI, Paolo FIORUCCI for their innovative and exciting work done in collaboration with the CYCLOPs project.

Special thanks go to EGEE’08’s sponsors, Dell, Intel, Proline, iSGTW, GridCast, HPC Wire and On-Demand Enterprise. The GLOBAL project has provided video streaming of all the plenary sessions giving a much appreciated window into the conference for those unable to attend. Dr Bob Jones, Project Director stressed how impressed he was with the scope and quality of the work during the week, and commended the Programme Committee, chaired by the departing Technical Director, Erwin Laure. Without the outstanding organisational skills of the Project Office at CERN this year’s meeting could not have happened of course, especially Anne-Lise Goisset, Ms EGEE’08!

Final thanks went to local partners and TUBITAK ULAKBIM, TRGrid and especially to conference organizers Visitur who have smoothed the way for all the presenters and conveners and whose stunning catering has helped to make the week such an enjoyable experience for all the delegates.

Catania, ItalyIt just remains to thank everyone who has presented, convened, organised, attended and contributed to the fantastic atmosphere this week – make sure you put the next meeting in your diary, OGF25/EGEE User Forum in Catania, Italy from 2nd to 6th March 2009, which will be hosted by INFN. See you all in Italy and a sad goodbye to Istanbul!

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