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Saturday, April 17, 2010

We leave with a bang... not with a whimper

The closing session of the last EGEE User Forum is over.... and after delightful week in sun-soaked Uppsala the EGEE UF 5 has come to an end with a bang. The bang in question being the eruption in Iceland of a volcano that has sent a cloud of ash over Europe and disrupted flights for the next 36 hours at least. For me, and I'm sure many of the attendees, we have at least an additional day to experience lovely Uppsala. For some perhaps a whole weekend!

The meeting itself marked the end of a 9 year period of experimentation and prototyping of production e-infrastructures in Europe that started with the European Data Grid and ended with the Enabling Grids for E-Science (EGEE-III) project. Ahead of us lies the challenge of a new beginning - building a sustainable European wide production e-infrastructure from a federation of integrated National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) and resources from European International Research Organisations (EIROs).

The User Forum itself demonstrated again the diversity of the user communities using the European Grid Infrastructure. Over the years a compelling service offering has developed to support data intensive science. The challenge facing EGI is to determine where this service offering has to be adapted to meet the requirements emerging from the ESFRI projects. Many of these were part of a technical session during the meeting and a few participated in the exhibition. I hope to see many of these projects return to the EGI Technical Forum in Amsterdam during 14-17th September along with many new ones.

I hope your transition from EGEE to EGI is a smooth one, and if you have any onging concerns please contact me at director@egi.eu.

1 comment:

Catherine Gater said...

The transition from EGEE to EGI has got to be smoother than the transition from Uppsala to our various home destinations! Many of us are still stuck in Sweden, some are trying various combinations of trains/buses/ferries to get home. Good luck to everyone still on the road, the EGEE team has fingers and toes crossed that everyone makes it back in the shortest time possible. Bon courage as my French colleagues would say.