Gearing up for the EGI Technical Forum with Globus and the virtual teams

The EGI Technical Forum 2012 kicks off officially tomorrow, but already the crowds are gathering at the Clarion Congress Hotel in Prague. Outside the meeting rooms today, the booths are going up, the posters are being pinned and the Czech sausages are already disappearing like magic. (Personally I blame the GridCast Prague golem @GolemPraha, even if he is technically undead).

Today’s co-located meetings include the second GlobusEUROPE annual conference, organised by the Initiative for Globus in Europe, and the NGI International Liaisons meeting for EGI. The international liaisons gathered to hear about progress from the virtual teams. These are lightweight, international working groups set up to solve particular problems of interest to the community, for example supporting MPI, measuring usage of the grid, supporting new users such as computational chemistry and in the cultural heritage area. You can find out more about the virtual teams and how your NGI can join at https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Virtual_Team_Projects.

The GlobusEUROPE event got underway with progress reports from Helmut Heller of the Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE), Steve Tuecke, Co-Principal Investigator of the Globus project and Steven Newhouse, Director of the European Grid Infrastructure. We also heard about the European Globus Community Forum (EGCF), the organizational body of the Globus community in Europe. Its goal is to boost an integrated approach to collaboration on Globus development and to provide an organizational platform to foster cooperation within Europe and beyond. Its members are users, administrators, and developers, who are applying the Globus Toolkit as their middleware or are interested in doing so. GlobusOnline itself has seen nearly 7PB of data and half a billion files moved since it started up. There is some exciting news about GlobusOnline in Europe coming soon – keep an eye out!