Opening remarks from Bob: Preparing for EGI

Well, if it wasn't official before, EGEE'09 is in full swing. After an excellent breakfast, delegates gathered for the welcoming plenary.

The opening talk from Bob Jones, project director of EGEE, covered the current state of Enabling Grids for E-sciencE and the what the project is doing to prepare for the European Grid Infrastructure. (You can see his slides here.)

Jones gave the standard project statistics (number of users, processing cores, sites, etc.), mentioning that – as part of the project's transition preparations – EGEE is redefining some metrics such as who is a user and that sites known for poor performance may be excluded from the infrastructure in the future. Everyone must step up their game, it seems, for EGI. He complimented the hard work of the users – much of which is recorded in the latest Book of Abstracts from the EGEE'09 User Forum. Stop by the EGEE booth to pick up a copy if you like, along with many other EGEE produced publications.

An important way applications can advertise their work – by self registry – is the Applications Database (at http://appdb.eu-egee.org). “This is information NGI's (National Grid Infrastructure's) will need to justify putting resources in to EGI,” said Jones.

Training is another crucial ingredient for a sustainable grid community. Jones showed a map that reported the number of accredited trainers in each country. In the EGI model, NGI's will be responsible for training. Jones message: “If these numbers seem a little low in your country, be sure that your trainers are accredited.” (Learn more here: http://www.eu-egee.org/index.php?id=238.)

gLite, the middleware developed and supported by EGEE, has recently expanded in functionality – now running on more Unix distributions. The RESPECT programme, which identifies third party software that works well with gLite, is a resource that all in the community can benefit from and will be one of the important legacies left to EGI, Jones said.

Looking to the future, some of the most exciting science of tomorrow is in planning today. Eleven 'ESFRI' projects (projects in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures road map) are present at the conference. These and will be working with the grid community to plan for meeting their data needs.

Not to be forgotten – the conference social events! Aside from the Wednesday networking lunch and the Wednesday gala dinner, this evening (Monday) while milling around the welcome cocktail we'll have the chance to meet or reconnect with our colleagues and see demonstrations and the posters of the conference. Be sure to vote for the best demo and poster!

Click on the Zoomerang link below to cast your vote. (Please note that you will only be able to vote once and this link is unique to you).

To review the list of posters, visit http://indico.cern.ch/sessionDisplay.py?sessionId=137&slotId=0&confId=55893#2009-09-21.
To watch the demo videos, visit http://www.youtube.com/enablinggrids or click on the individual links in the survey.
This survey will close at 7pm on Wednesday 23 and the results will be announced at the closing plenary on Thursday 24.

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=U2D7T9BA8UVQ