Guest posting from Bob Jones - EC-Brazil workshop part 1

The state university of Sao Paulo played host to a recent EC-Brazil workshop held on 8-9 September. Bob Jones, the project director for EGEE, gave us this report on the days' events:

The goal of this workshop was to find opportunities for Brazil and the EC to work closer together on ICT subjects. The outcome of the workshop was to be used for a high-level meeting in Brasilia later in the week. It was structured as plenary sessions including three concurrent parallel sessions on specific topics such as e-Infrastructures, simulation software, microelectronics, supercomputing, network embedded intelligence and future-internet. At the end of the sessions were a couple of wrap-up panels, charged with establishing a list of suggestions on how to foster collaborative initiatives between Brazil and the EU. There were approximately 70 people present at the workshop.

A number of suggestions on collaboration concerning e-Infrastructures were collected during a panel session in which I was involved. The suggestions can be summarised as follows:

• There is already on-going collaboration between Europe and Brazil at the networking and grid infrastructure layers. This willingness to collaborate needs to be reconfirmed during the transition from EGEE to EGI and EELA to LGI. Reinforcing the inter-operation of e-Infrastructures between Brazil and Europe will allow e-Science to flourish in Brazil and permit the creation of multi-disciplinary teams spanning the continents.


• Brazil is unique from a bio-diversity (e.g. Amazon basin) and astronomical environment (hosting observatories due to climatic conditions and population distribution) standpoint, which means it is a key partner with whom Europe has to work in these areas.


• Collaboration with Europe on training of and dissemination to Brazil’s 160,000 strong research community would encourage the knowledge and use of e-Science techniques

Below are more details of the contents of the workshop:

An opening session with Brazilian representatives and Mario Campolargo for the EC set the scene. I participated in the parallel session on e-Infrastructures for which the highlights are shown below. There were about 50 people in the audience which is a lot since there were 3 parallel sessions.

Bernard Marechal presented EELA-2 and plans for LGI – A Latin American equivalent of EGI.

I presented EGEE and EGI. My slides are here.

There were then 3 presentations by Brazilian computer scientists (Antonio Tadeu Gomes – LNCC, Mario Dantas – UFSC, Philippe Navaux - UFRGS) covering theories for resource allocation, system of systems studies etc.

Gerry Devine from Reading University described the work of the METAFOR project (Common Metadata for Climate Modelling Digital Repositories). It has 11 partners, EC funding of 2.2Meuros, started March 2008 and will last 3 years. They are working on CIM – Common Information Model for climate data and will produce a UML model to be used for CMIP5 (from the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change).

Soraia Musse presented the work of PUC in Brazil on visualisation for different fields. This talk concentrated on crowd simulation and the detection of usual behaviours. It has technology links to gaming and security industries with complex simulations requiring important computing resources.

After this there was a video presentation with people from Barcelona as part of the Master Class series. The video was a short film called “spread through the air” produced by Brazilian students at the arts school that had won a critics award at the Cannes film festival.

The afternoon session was dedicated to network subjects and the future internet, during which Michael Stanton presented RNP the Brazilian NREN. RNP has links to Europe via RedClara (goes to Madrid) and the USA via ALICE. Upgrades are planned (RedClara2 & ALICE2). Cross-border fibres to neighbouring countries (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile) are foreseen for 2010.

They hope to have the 24 regional capitals in Brazil linked by 10G in 2010.