EGI Community Forum Tuesday

I am here at the first EGI Community Forum 2012/EMI Second Technical Conference, at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, near Munich. It’s the first time that I join a grid computing event, and I find it exciting to be part of such a complex and international environment...where outreach and communication is a recognised asset. An intense group of technical and senior managers who have worked for many years to build a European computing infrastructure for science. A lot of people attended the sustainability talks and this is because the world is changing. Cloud computing is now an important part of European science as well as grids, and the big issues are now how to combine these with the appropriate software and funding to create a set of services for all science from the very small to the very large. EMI is central to all the discussions, being the main technology provider for the EGI sites. Today in his keynote speech the director of EMI project explained how EMI can evolve into a distribution for all science based on the ScienceSoft (http://sciencesoft.org) initiative. EMI developers started illustrating the latest EMI developments, such as common and standard based solutions for storage, authentication and information publishing. This will follow tomorrow with the overview of EMI key features on job submission and executions, data management, and, last but not least, a series of tutorials demonstrating many of these features.