Looking back...looking forward

It's been such an exciting week of diverse and interesting sessions, booths, events and workshops at the community forum that many of us sometimes forget to reflect on what we've found interesting. The penultimate evening seems like the perfect time to do so...it may just provide the perfect memory-jogger to remind us to catch up with someone we meant to speak to.
Way back on Tuesday, I blogged about the talks that had piqued my interest that day. Yesterday, I had a chance to catch up with Barbera van Schaik and talk to her about her work dealing with DNA sequence data on the grid.



This morning, I attended another excellent series of talks in the portals & gateways session. Soma2, a project of the Finnish CSC supported by EGI-InSPIRE, is a web-browser-based molecular modelling platform that is bringing the power of the grid to chemistry. Described as requiring no technical knowledge to use, it had just had its first successful user at the time of the talk. Continuing the user-friendly portal theme for chemists, InsilicoLab brings Gaussian, GAMESS and Turbomole to members of the Gaussian and vo.plgrid.pl (Polish grid) virtual organizations, with no specific previous knowledge of grid required of users. And if we're talking about a future grid portal as easy as pie, Gridcake is an easy Java-based gLite library, itself spawning GridCamp, a collaborative web portal.
Right now, I'm looking forward to Horst Zuse's talk tomorrow. Let's see what we can report on that...until then, some light relief also from Tuesday...