Good to be back...

It's good to be back in Taipei and see all those friendly faces familiar from previous ISGCs and OGFs. As always, the colleagues at Academia Sinica have done a great job making us feel at home straight away and to overcome the jet lag by keeping busy and eating well. The combination of ISGC and OGF promises to be interesting.

Those familiar with ISGC may have noticed a subtle change - the acronym now stands for 'International Symposium on Grids and Clouds'. This reflects the growing interest in the e-Research community in cloud computing and how it can extend the range of tools we have available to develop virtual research environments. The programme of the conference also reflects this with a number of sessions devoted to 'Grids and Clouds'. It is interesting to see how the two technological trends complement each other and how people learn to choose 'horses for courses' instead of blindly following trends. I will keep my eyes open for examples of this and hope to add a couple of posts on the topic over the next few days.