GridCast: live and behind the scenes of grid computing

SARA celebrates 40 years of ICT research infrastructure in the Netherlands

2011-12-09T16:50:00.012+01:00

At the end of a week that has included innovation in Brussels and Nobel prize winning physics in Sweden comes a celebration – the 40th anniversary of SARA, e-infrastructure provider in the Netherlands. Our EGI.eu offices are next door to SARA so I am particularly pleased to join them for their celebrations. We are glamorously hosted today by the Hermitage museum in Amsterdam (which I’m ashamed to say I have yet to visit after 18 months in the city). The day is in two parts, a symposium in the morning (involving presentations) and a celebration in the afternoon (also presentations, but with the more traditionally celebratory food, drinks and music as well).

This morning’s keynote was delivered by Marc Teerlink from IBM, who introduced us to ‘supercomputer’, Watson. Watson made history by winning the US quiz programme Jeopardy! in February this year - rivalling the ability of humans to answer questions in natural language. Having watched Watson in action on a video, I’m glad I didn’t take it on when I saw it at SC11 in Seattle last month, it could have been embarrassing. Incidentally, one of the trickiest problems they had to solve was not to finesse the computing but to find a way for Watson to press the buzzer – the finger they constructed for it kept breaking the button. But Watson’s ability to engage in this deep question and answer model could have benefits not just for winning quiz shows, but for example in health for diagnostics. As Teerlink said, with a trillion devices online and 2 billion users, businesses at the moment are “dying of thirst in an ocean of data.” How do you make sense of it all?

Understanding data, or e-knowledge, was a theme picked up by the post-lunch keynote speaker Larry Smart of Calit2 who looked at some of the leading edge applications for supercomputers. Modeling flames, supernovae, fusion, Parkinson’s, earthquakes, water vapour in the atmosphere and renewable fuels were just some applications. “Supercomputers are like putting your glasses on, they make the fuzzy suddenly look very sharp,” said Smart. But supercomputers aren’t enough on their own, you need supernetworks and supervisualistion to mine the data. GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), for example, provides a 10 Gbps pipe for sharing data, and IBM uses multi-stacked screens to visualise it. Supercomputers are now being built that are optimised for eating this ‘Big Data’ rather than for solving equations – ‘Flash’ GORDON in San Diego has several TB of RAM. According to Smart, commercial clouds are overhyped, the future is in HPC clouds, an area where SARA is of course very active.

Dutch company Philips is a heavy user of the BigGrid grid computing infrastructure – of BigGrid's 1.6 million jobs and 5.3 million CPU hours per year, Philips' usage represents around half. According to Emile Aarts of Philips, e-science will have a big future at Philips in the areas of digital pathology, such as digitising and sharing tissue samples, for digital health monitoring and intelligent urban systems, including street lamps.

So it’s a happy birthday to SARA from me and all at EGI. As a person of a similar vintage (shh – keep that to yourself) I’m delighted to see a 40 year in such excellent shape. Gelukkige verjaardag and all the best for the next 40 years!

Nobel prize winner Schmidt addresses escience2011 in Stockholm

2011-12-07T16:58:00.003+01:00

Today I am lucky enough to be in Stockholm while the city prepares for the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. Not only that, but I am attending the IEEE eScience2011 meeting which this afternoon welcomed Brian P Schmidt, winner of the 2011 Nobel prize for physics as a keynote speaker. Prof Schmidt of the Australian National University talked us through how astronomy has offered insights into the history of the universe from the very earliest observations by Tycho Brahe here in Sweden in the 16th Century, right through to the biggest challenges for researchers today: the search for dark energy, the tantalising hints on faster than light particles seen at CERN and detecting life on other planets. Prof Schmidt’s own work, which ultimately earned him his Nobel prize with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter, showed from observations that rather than slowing down, the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.

Schmidt’s address today focused on where astronomy meets data. His SkyMapper project, which is currently scanning the southern sky in unprecedented detail has a peak data rate of 1 TByte per day. ASKAP, an array of 36 radio telescope dishes, being built in Australia will generate 2TB per second. This impressive array is still just a pathfinder project for the monumental Square Kilometer Array, which will scatter thousands of linked dishes across the desert (whether Australian or South African remains to be decided). The SKA will pose challenges in connectivity that today we do not yet have ways to solve. Schmidt predicted that astronomy will increasingly rely on IT to make sense of this sea of data, with IT specialists at the core of building new telescopes.

Exciting stuff for astronomy, IT and anyone interested in where we all came from. Prof Schmidt also very kindly agreed to give an exclusive Q&A on his work and ideas for the role of e-science in astronomy to International Science Grid This Week, our sister pubiication. Watch out at www.isgtw.org for more news soon!

Curiosity - not killing the cat, but driving economic recovery

2011-12-06T14:10:00.007+01:00

Is curiosity-driven science just philanthropy or an economic necessity? Should funding for blue sky research wait for better times? Making a convincing argument for ‘no’ as the answer to this question was Prof André Geim – 2010 Nobel prize winner for physics and researcher into new wonderstuff, graphene.

Geim argued that Golden Ages follow major advances in technology. The general purpose technologies we all use today can be traced back to earlier advances in fundamental sciences, pre-dating the company that markets them. For example, the innovation underlying the iPod could be said to go further back than Apple. This time lag leaves us emotionally and economically detached from the basic science that underpins the technologies we rely on every day, the so-called ‘disruptive technologies’.

But when you look out for the next big thing, according to Geim the existing pool of disruptive technologies is nearly exhausted – graphene is really the only big thing in physics/materials at the moment. Over the last 10 years, research has stagnated.

Science today means 7 million researchers, 1 trillion dollars invested in fundamental research, about 1.5% of global GDP. In developed countries, about 0.5% of GDP is supposedly spent on fundamental research – but Geim contends there has been a shift in the definition of fundamental. It should mean the unknown unknowns – the research that is done for the same reason Mallory climbed Everest - ‘because it’s there’. By their nature, the results from blue sky research cannot be predicted but potential profits can be colossal. The discovery of the transistor generated trillions on trillions of dollars - but only decades after the fact.

So, what to do? According to Geim, heavily invest in curiosity driven science and particuarly in the right individuals. “The status quo is a slow economic suicide,” says Geim.

Master class in science communication or how to be more like Brian Cox

2011-12-06T13:55:00.001+01:00

The launch session of the Innovation Convention exhorted us to take young people seriously - where will the innovation come from if not from them? So working on that basis, young people also need to learn to tell everyone about their ideas effectively, from the general public, to policy makers to their peers.

Hence a master class in science communication yesterday afternoon, with two masters in the form of Claudie Haignere, a doctor, politician, former astronaut and current President of Universcience in Paris, and Leo Enright, Chairman of Discover Science and Engineering, Ireland. The pupils were there to bring their problems and questions to the rest of the panel. Enright started with an apology for not being Brian Cox, well known commentator on astrophysics and ambassador for CERN, who had originally been part of the programme. Assessing the eminent Prof Cox’s appeal to the media in rather tongue in cheek fashion, Enright made the point that the key was probably Cox’s genuine enthusiasm for his subject and his credibility as a scientist. “Good science and good communication may not always go together in your field,” he said, “but if you find the right communicator, it pays off to be sincere, be yourself and get past your nerves.”

As a journalist, he also noted what he called the collapse in the business model for journalism. Staff science correspondents are increasingly rare in the US, for example, where the Texan Houston Chronicle apparently no longer has a dedicated space reporter. Houston we indeed have a problem. An interesting point given the current crisis in the British press surrounding the Leveson inquiry – fewer stories based on phone hacking might leave more space for science journalism perhaps?

Pupil Jeremy Wilks of EuroNews reported that his hardest challenge is to make the science look and sound good for a TV audience. Credibility is key, he’s not looking for soundbites, he needs his featured scientists to talk naturally and honestly about their research. Not to forget also giving air to what went wrong along the way and the problems they successfully solved. Scientists shouldn’t pretend science has all the answers - they need to get across that they, and science, are still learning. Good advice!

An all star cast at the Innovation Convention, Brussels

2011-12-06T12:50:00.003+01:00

This week I’m back in Brussels for the first Innovation Convention. It’s a healthily attended event at around 1200 delegates and has certainly attracted some high profile speakers – Jose Manuel Barroso and Maire Geoghegan-Quinn from the European Commission, Silvia Fendi and Viviane Westwood from the world of fashion, executives from Google, RyanAir, L’Oreal and a brief appearance by German Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel by video. Presumably taking time out from her rather busy schedule in France at the moment, she assured us that innovation was central to the strategy for growth for 2020 and wished us all a successful event. If I can drop any more names by the end of the event, I will do!

Barroso, President of the EC launched the event yesterday morning with a call to strengthen the links between research, innovation and education, the three points of the ‘knowledge triangle’. European entrepreneurs need less red tape and solid investment to get the economy back on track. The Innovation Union flagship initiative itself is concentrating on ICT, climate change and sustainable energy, all themes that will be developed further during the event.

Barroso also announced the appointment of Prof Anne Glover as Chief Scientific Advisor to the EC and followed up with the winners of the Women Innovators Prizes – a tough competition won by Gitte Neubauer, founder of Cellzone, a drug discovery company for inflammatory diseases and cancer. In fact, 2 of the 3 prize winners were in the area of health, with the third in clean energy. With this laudable celebration of women’s achievements in innovation, I did wonder why it was necessary to have 3 female hostesses standing immobile on stage next to the trophies – for me, it slightly undermined the empowerment message.

The opening concluded with a discussion on ‘building a global innovation economy’ with executives from Alcatel-Lucent, L’Oreal, Biocom and Fendi, with the VC from Cambridge University. The session was rather skilfully chaired by Ann Mettler of the Lisbon Council. When introducing the speaker from Fendi (designer of the ‘baguette’ bag in case you didn’t know) she mentioned rather wistfully that she didn’t have one yet. I hope one is forthcoming.

All agreed that innovation, often used in the discussion as a synonym for creativity, was a ‘good thing’ in times of crisis – investment rates of 3 to 15% of turnover were bandied about for various industries. Jean-Paul Agon took a more robust line and said that Europe had an attitude problem – we need to invest in young talent, to avoid a ‘lost generation’ of scientists, nurture infrastructure and to be bold. When I asked the panel about the role of grid and cloud computing in the future of innovation, Leszek Borysiewicz of Cambridge University said yes to commercial use of the grid, yes to investment in clouds and watch out for what happens if you don’t pay attention to grid. Hear, hear!

(For a lively overview of the discussions check out Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/search/ic2011gold)

Grids, clouds and world health at SciTech Europe 2011

2011-11-25T10:33:00.006+01:00

TinTin might be bringing Belgian culture to the masses in cinemas at the moment, but for me it was another day, another train trip to Brussels… In the next couple of weeks, it might be worth buying a season ticket from Amsterdam to the home of beer and waffles –SciTech Europe 2011, followed by an FP7 information day, and finishing up with the Innovation Convention on 5 and 6 December. Today it was SciTech Europe, an annual event from Public Service Review, this time held in the aptly named ‘Cube’ in Mont des Arts. Slightly reminiscent of the Louvre’s glass pyramid (although obviously a different shape) the glass cube hosted around 150 participants from government, academia and business, all brought together to discuss ways to promote science and technology in Europe.

I was there to host the European Grid Infrastructure booth – Steven Newhouse, Director of EGI also delivered a masterclass on the sustainable future of grid computing in Europe. It’s all about extracting knowledge from the data deluge hitting researchers from the ever-burgeoning ‘internet of things’, among other sources. On the horizon is a cloud for European researchers that will combine public and commercial resources, complementing the EC’s investment in innovation with commercial expertise.

The event closed with a visionary presentation from Francis Moussy, of the World Health Organisation. He alerted us to some scary statistics for diseases such as dengue fever, HIV and leishmaniasis that are still hitting the developing world hard. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected every year by diseases that we in Europe may never even have heard of. Every year new diseases emerge, such as avian flu, adding to the burden carried by health services.

The WHO focuses on alleviating these ‘infectious diseases of poverty’ and is due to launch a global report in January 2012. The report will follow three themes– the effects of climate change on health, the influence of health systems and the promises offered by innovation. One key area affected by these issues is Africa and Moussa noted that when you look at research collaborations in the region, you find a surprising thing. There are many collaborations between African institutions and North America or Europe… but very few between the African institutions themselves. These sorts of collaborations are what EGI is hoping to support in its recently signed Memorandum of Understanding with Meraka, representing SAGrid, the South African computing grid. The CHAIN project (Coordination and Harmonisation of Advanced e-Infrastructures) is also active in building bridges between e-Infrastructures in different countries.

Right now, the WHO is starting a new project on innovation and ageing. By 2050, 80% of older people will live in what are now classed as low or middle income countries. Ageing happens faster and earlier in these countries and heavily impacts activities such as innovation, infrastructure building and business. The WHO will tackle the problem using four approaches: they will map what people need now and what is currently provided for them, create product profiles for medical companies to use as guidelines for developing new products for this market, facilitate technology transfer and create or augment existing Centres of Excellence in these areas for research and development.

As Captain Haddock would say… blistering barnacles, snowy!

SHIWA and e-ScienceTalk sign up to work together

2011-11-22T16:32:00.003+01:00

This morning e-ScienceTalk signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the SHIWA project (SHaring Interoperable Workflows for large-scale scientific simulations on Available DCIs). Coordinated by Prof Peter Kacsuk of MTA SZTAKI, Hungary, SHIWA will leverage existing workflow based solutions and enable cross-workflow and inter-workflow exploitation of distributed computing infrastructures. SHIWA develops, deploys and operates the SHIWA Simulation Platform to offer users production level services supporting workflow interoperability. E-ScienceTalk will work with SHIWA to communicate their results through our blogs, websites, publications, social media and events. So we'll see you at the EGI Community Forum in March 2012, if not before!

The sound of SC11

2011-11-17T11:10:00.001+01:00

We've just heard some exciting news from our friend Domenico Vicinanza who's over at the Supercomputing, SC11 conference in Seattle.

If you don't know him already, Domenico's the man behind the Lost Sounds Orchestra, which used grid computing to simulate the sounds of ancient instruments that had long been forgotten. He also works on turning
pretty much anything into music, via a process he calls sonification.

So what exactly is sonification? Well essentially sonification takes data, and maps it into music. For example letters can be mapped to notes, meaning the sentence 'Cats are fluffy' could be expressed musically as:

Domenico is now planning to turn a whole series of tweets into music, live from the SC11 conference later today. And you can get involved. If you're on twitter simply tweet a message with the hashtag #SC11 between 11am – 12 noon PST and it will be used to create the performance. We can't wait!

Cracow Grid Workshop 2011 - CGW2011

2011-11-10T10:19:00.007+01:00

I have just returned from a very stimulating and rewarding three days at the 2011 Cracow Grid Workshop. Apart from discovering that Cracow is further South than Prague, just, I also learnt more about grid-related initiatives that relate to the Polish research community. I was pleased to see a good turn out to all the sessions, to see a wide age range with a strong new generation embracing distributed computing and, most importantly, an attentive and questioning audience.

The ongoing discussion about cloud versus grid computing paradigms surfaced in a number of areas with a clear dominance for the cloud model. Personally, I find this interesting but feel that it should not become the dominant debate. As we continue to embrace virtualisation as a mechanism for introducing greater flexibility to the way in which services are delivered we should be able to concentrate on delivering the right services to the right researchers rather than having philosophical discussions about infrastructure.

The other keynotes and talks covered a diverse spectrum of research areas. A number of talks presented WLCG and the Polish contribution to LHC work. Life Sciences was well represented too both at the level of the Life Sciences Grid Community (LSGC) which has been working closely with EGI over the last year and also we heard from the Virtual Physiological Human community. A number of other EU-projects with significant Polish involvement such as UrbanFlood and also the International Desktop Grid Federation were also featured.

Having been fortunate enough to be invited to participate in the jury to judge the posters I had the opportunity, not to say obligation, to study them in some detail. The standard was high so I felt that I came away feeling that I had acquired a good overview of activity in Poland. Posters are important and well worth the effort that goes into producing them; they are a wonderful source of information for others and an opportunity for researchers to rethink the goals and purpose of their research. We at EGI should make more use of these - perhaps more competitions and bigger prizes at our forums?

The strongest message that I took away from CGW11 was that whilst there is much good work being done, too many projects are not working in a sustainability-focused way. Within the context of EGI as a whole we have been promoting the move to a tiered approach modelled on the cloud paradigm with the intention of clearly separating the layers of infrastructure, core middleware services and then user services at the top. Many of the projects that I saw were re-creating elements from all of these layers. Whilst this works at a proof of concept level and enables research to be done in the short term; in the medium term the costs for sustaining all of the elements are high. EGI, that is the organisation EGI.eu in conjunction with the relevant NGIs, need to analyse these successful projects and identify the key elements and migrate these to the relevant tiers in the infrastructure. Typically, there will be elements that already exist and so we can then focus on the original elements with the greatest potential for impact in the research domain and add these to the production infrastructure.

I am pleased to report that the workshop included a wonderful conference dinner at a characterful micro-brewery restaurant in the old city in the centre of Cracow. Always a useful opportunity to push forward discussions from the earlier sessions as well as learn more about the rich history of this fascinating part of Europe from the local hosts.

Collaborative work and the Cloud

2011-11-02T11:52:00.000+01:00

On Tuesday 11th October 2011, the Aristote association held a seminar on "Collaborative work and the Cloud" at École Polytechnique in Paris, France. The seminar was organized by Drissa Houatra (Orange Labs) and Philippe d'Anfray (CEA).

This day was a perfect opportunity to see very diverse presentations centered on the concept of collaboration.

Perception and restitution of user actions in a virtual 3D environment (Patrick Horain, Telecom Sud Paris)
Presentation of different techniques allowing to recreate in real time a 3D avatar in a virtual world, thanks to simple 2D acquisition methods (such as a simple webcam, as opposed to more advanced devices such as Microsoft's Kinect), including detection of movement and facial expressions to reproduce them on the avatar. The underlying idea is that, during a virtual meeting, it is much easier to understand one's interlocutor with physical and facial clues.

Collaborative modeling of services systems. The case of service innovation in telecoms" (Florie Bugeaud, Université de Technologie de Troyes)
Presentation of Florie Burgeaud's PhD thesis. She focused on how to have different actors (sales, management, technical) collaborate to define new services. She presented a model based, among other things, on hypergraphs: thanks to a web interface (iSamara, property of France Télécom), the actors take notes on the description of a potential service, i.e., on the actors involved, the locations, the events, and so on. From these notes and the links between elements, a hypergraph representing situations and "transition paths" between these situations is determined; these paths show the possible services. This very interesting approach could simplify the determination of a new product or product feature.

Enabling a collaborative environment via the Contrail project (Roberto Cascella, INRIA)
Presentation of European project Contrail, which aims to provide a federating infrastructure for Clouds, which considers the issues of global authentication and SLA. It relies on OVF for the description of applications, GAFS for storage, CDMI for images, and should support OCCI. The solution will be distributed as open-source software.

PRISME, the new Web 2.0 Intranet of IFP Énergies Nouvelles (Hervé Durant et Nathalie Triquet, IFPEN)
Presentation of the intranet/extranet and internet websites used at IFPEN. They are dynamic sites adapted to each user depending on the projects they are involved in, capable of handling workflows for documentation management, providing modification alerts for selected pages, etc. The solution is based on Jalios's JCMS solution (Java + Tomcat) with an Active Directory for authentication and an Apache server to handle load balancing between 2 servers.

XWiki: fostering information sharing thanks to an applicative wiki (Ludovic Dubost, XWiki)
Very interesting presentation of open-source software XWiki. XWiki is a wiki solution with advanced functionalities for managing pages and their content: WYSIWYG editor, importing of Microsoft Office or LibreOffice documents (either gathering data to display it properly in the wiki or, for Powerpoint presentations for instance, inserting images from the slides directly in the wiki), possibility of having tables with filters to display only selected information, teplates for pages with forms support (dropdown lists), and more. It is actually possible to define data models and integrate them in the wiki pages to create integrated applications in the wiki: project management, holiday requests, expense accounts, HR management (to store job descriptions, résumés, and so on, allowing people to collaborate on application selection), support requests for servers, and a lot more of interesting possibilities. Current customers include EADS, JCDecaux, Aelia, EMC, Fidelia, WaterWiki. There is currently no tool to easily migrate another wiki to XWiki, but it natively supports 6 wiki formatting styles, allowing manual import of pages.

Memory architecture (Jean-Marie Dallet, Sliders-Lab, EESI)
Presentation of projects realized by Sliders-Lab to display multimedia documents in a simple, interactive way. For example, representing an image and movie database as an Archimedes screw, a torus, a tower of Babel, etc., allowing navigation inside (mainly designed for touch user interfaces).

SysFera-DS: towards a collaborative portal for EDF (Jean-Marc Laymajoux, EDF, and Benjamin Depardon, SysFera)
With Jean-Marc Laymajoux, we have presented the results of a collaborative project conducted in 2011. The project aimed at providing a solution adapted to the EDF environment that would allow various users (non-IT specialists, developers, directors) to access simply, through various interfaces (command-line interface, C++, Python, WebServices) to distributed and heterogeneous HPC resources.
The talk introduced the project's context, the solution implemented with SysFera-DS, and the various modules developed for this solution: user-management system (UMS), file-management system (FMS), information-management system (IMS) and task-management system (TMS). The solution is currently used by EDF R&D and is already interfaced with EDF's SALOME platform (http://www.salome-platform.org/) and accessible through a demo website.

Real time and collaboration: inventing new usages (Alexandre Eisenchteter, af83)
Quick presentation of UCEngine, a library allowing real-time publish/subscribe with advanced functionalities: widget, video stream, etc.

Illustration : Working Together Teamwork Puzzle Concept by http://thegoldguys.blogspot.com/ - CC-BY-SA

Africa in Florence

2011-11-01T15:50:00.000+01:00

It's time for the last video from eChallenges!

One of the things we liked best about the conference is the high representation from African countries who are looking onto partnering with European organisations to on new projects for their countries. We grabbed Lieketseng Tjokotsi of the department of Science and Technology in Lesotho to find out why she was at eChallenges and what she hoped to get out of the conference.

Introducing Impact

2011-10-31T17:07:00.000+01:00

Hildelies Balk works at the National Library of the Netherlands, where she's looking into digitising the massive amounts of historical material they have to offer. It's a tough task and one the Impact project is hoping to beat. Hildelies tells us more below.

EuroRIs-net: The one-stop shop for research

2011-10-31T12:58:00.000+01:00

And here comes video number two..

This time it's care of Wieslaw Studencki who had the exhibition stand next to us at eChallenges. Wieslaw is from EuroRIs-Net which is a network for all the research infrastructures in Europe - be that telescopes, synchotrons or grids. EuroRIs-Net is hoping to be the one-stop shop for researchers who need access to such facilities so you can just pop along to them and they can tell you who to get in contact with.

Thanks for talking to us Wieslaw! (We're sorry about the siren :S )

What's in Pandora's box?

2011-10-31T11:43:00.000+01:00

The GridCast team are back in the office following our trip to Florence and, as promised, we still have lots of goodies left over from eChallenges.

First up is the following interview with Sara Grilli of the Pandora project. Pandora has been set up to give crisis managers training, so they know how to react if disaster should actually strike. It's pretty cool, and can even change the training situation depending on how stressed out a trainee is (they monitor things like trainee heart rates to find out). Anyway watch below to hear Sara tell you more.

Art, culture and ICT

2011-10-28T11:55:00.000+02:00

Florence is a city well-known for its art and culture, a topic that has been the focus of some of the sessions here at eChallenges.

Yesterday afternoon, we heard how ICT is playing a part in our digital libraries and cultural heritage. You can read more about some of the talks over at the EGI blog, care of Sara Coelho. We’ve also got a video interview with Hildelies Balk, of the Impact project, coming up next week.

In fact we’ve been very busy talking to the delegates here at eChallenges over the last couple of days. We’ve heard about the Pandora project, which is providing online crisis management, we’ve spoken to some of the African delegates about the importance of working with European researchers and we’re discussed the importance of making Europe’s e-Infrastructures better known with our neighbours here in the exhibition area. Although eChallenges is ending today, we've still got more for our GridCast readers so stick with us.

Welcome to eChallenges

2011-10-27T11:28:00.000+02:00

We’ve just arrived in the beautiful city of Florence for this year’s eChallenges event.

Although the weather is not the best (umbrellas are a must-have item) it looks like it’s shaping up to be a pretty busy conference. We’ve already had quite a few visitors over to the EGI/e-ScienceTalk stand to find out more about grids can help researchers in their country, and we’ve been doing our best to spread the e-science word.

The sessions today have covered a range of topics. eGovernance is quite a big topic so this morning’s plenary started off with how Florence and Tuscany are trying to use ICT to provide services to their citizens. Later on Klaus-Peter Eckert continued the discussion with a talk on how Germany is using cloud computing in the public sector.Eckert said that instead of migrating existing applications onto the cloud, a better way of demonstrating their benefits would be to start with novel applications to show that certain services can be provided in better, more secure, innovative ways.

Cloud computing is a bit of a buzz word nowadays, along with ‘smart’ – the topic of Julia Glidden’s presentation. Glidden spoke about how smart cities and living labs can drive innovation. Living labs bring together SMES, citizens and public administrators to design products and services. They take the model of product innovation and apply it to public services. However challenges so far tend to include that outcomes are hyper local, which don’t get shared across Europe and are non-scalable.

Anyway that’s just a taster of the conference so far. We hope to bring you much more over the next couple of days, so stick around!(We’re afraid the conference internet is not quite up to uploading videos but we promise to put them up as soon as we’re back.)

Reflecting on e-IRG: Innovation and Grand Challenges

2011-10-17T10:54:00.006+02:00

Last week, I was at this year’s second e-IRG workshop in the picturesque polish town of Poznan. It was an action-packed two days as delegates presented and debated best practices and policies for e-infrastructures. Opportunities for ‘joining forces’ were promoted through sharing information, and we heard from a number of ESFRI cluster projects (BioMedBridges, CRISP, DASISH, ENviro, EuroAgro and ITER) as well as data infrastructure projects (EUDAT and OpenAire).

Opening the session was Kostantinos Glinos, Head of Unit Head GEANT and e-infrasturctures, DG INFSCO, who presented some of the possible actions from Common Strategic Framework actions (2014-2020). In the next few years, as e-infrastructures move away from a purely technical arena towards an infrastructure of services a broader initiatives and a wider range of skills and policies will be required. One of the new focuses is likely to be around fostering the RI innovation potential and their human capital.

Developing research e-infrastructure policies across national boundaries is especially important for progress, and this is what one project, e-INFRANet, is currently doing. So far, nine EU countries are involved and three core policy areas have been identified: clouds computing (not surprisingly), green issues and openness. Check out http://e-infranet.eu/ for information on their next workshop on 'The Open Agenda'.

I also heard about a relatively new policy development project called SIM4RDM ERANE. Six EU partners aim to provide a framework to enable researchers to use emerging technical infrastructures effectively. Answering questions such as: What are the bottlenecks for data management? What needs to happen within universities? Do we need new facilities and data management roles within universities? The findings from this project will feed into advising on data management policy for research infrastructure.

After a gala meal of traditional polish meal of goulash soup, a fish called Zander and pickled tangy cucumbers, I slept soundly, ready for a full day of discussion. Subjects tackled on the second day included how best to serve the user communities and also debate around the expanding role of e-IRG.

One talk, focussing on sustainability of e-infrastructure (which is my personal interest), highlighted some of the parameters to examine in building an open sustainable ICT research infrastructure. The research from the University of Brussels could provide those with an interest in examining sustainability with a useful model. Findings from this policy development project will be available at the end of the year at http://www.osiris-online.eu/.

Andrew Lyall from ELIXIR, spoke about BioMedBridges, an important project that will serve a large-scale user communities needs (over 3 million people). It is a consortium, formed by 21 partners (including EMBL) that will construct a common e-infrastructure to allow interoperability between data and services in the biological, medical, translational and clinical domains. Providing secure, robust and ethical access to data for a wide range of users will be the major effort of the project which starts in January 2012.

Immerse yourself in a virtual world. Introducing ‘e-ScienceCity’!

2011-10-11T09:45:00.003+02:00

The team at e-ScienceTalk are delighted to announce the launch of our new virtual e-ScienceCity island at www.e-sciencecity.org.

Building on the success of the GridCafé website which introduced people to the world of grids, we have built an interactive space where you will be able to discover more about grids in addition to exploring content on supercomputers, volunteer computing and clouds.The new virtual e-ScienceCity island is part of an OpenSim pilot, to create and evaluate a virtual venue dedicated to e-science and e-learning. In the upcoming months, e-ScienceCity will also be available in an enhanced 3-D design as part of New World Grid (open source version of Second Life).

We’d really like your input into developing our e-ScienceCity. The island is still under construction and we would like to make the journey through the site as enjoyable, helpful and informative as possible to new avatars. If you have any suggestions for content please do email us at info@e-sciencetalk. What do you think you might find in an e-ScienceCity?

The first area of the virtual world to be inhabited is CloudLounge which provides a description of the technologies and issues surrounding cloud computing. For those who would like to contribute your own desktop power there’s also a volunteer garage (currently populated with our latest e-ScienceBriefing, desktop grids). You can climb up our HPC Tower to find out about supercomputers. The latest e-infrastructure news will also be broadcast at the island’s Communication Centre and a forum has been created to help encourage debate on issues relating to e-science infrastructure. Please do share with us your ideas!

Hello to EUDAT, the EGI of data?

2011-10-10T16:33:00.000+02:00

GridCast wants to say a big hello to the newly launched EUDAT project. EUDAT has been funded by the European Commission to provide an e-infrastructure to handle the massive amounts of data coming out of today's science - it's quite a big task!

According to their website EUDAT aims to 'provide Europe’s scientific and research communities with a sustainable pan-European infrastructure for improved access to scientific data. Burgeoning volumes of valuable and complex data – newly available from powerful new scientific instruments, simulations and digitization of library resources – represents a fantastic opportunity for science, but has created new challenges related to data management, access and preservation. EUDAT aims to address these challenges and exploit the opportunities using its vision of a Collaborative Data Infrastructure.'

Hopefully in the future EUDAT's work will lead to a data infrastructure to complement the grid infrastructure provided by EGI and GÉANT's network infrastructure.

If you'd like to contribute to EUDAT's work you will be able offer your opinions through the EUDAT user forums as well as the Data Access and Interoperability Task Force. Check out their website for more info.

Exploit That R&D!

2011-10-03T18:09:00.001+02:00

Exploit That R&D!

My colleagues and I have charted up several years experience exploiting R&D projects that our company is involved in. In many of the projects we found that the process would start well, the market was analysed, the competitors charted, the USPs of our project results neatly identified, and so on. However we found that common to most of the projects was a point where we didn’t know what to do next. If we had had a business model for delivering a clear value proposition then fine, we could have proceeded to develop business plans for taking it to market. We would have run our best and worst case scenario analysis, totted up our financial sums and had some nice ROI figures. But HOW was the problem. How should this technology be provided? Where is the business? We have a consolidated result, some clever technology, unique in the world, but how do we move from collaboratively building something to practically selling it? “Open source” I hear someone shout. “In a cloud” someone else calls out. It seems that often at this point in the exploitation process, standard practice is to pick the best candidate from a list of contender models. A pragmatic solution perhaps, but one that overlooks many of the more subtle or innovative models. What is more, it’s an approach which lacks a unifying principle to allow each model to be reduced to the raw differences which separate them.

So over the last year or so, we realised that we had unintentionally been developing a technique do deal precisely with that big hurdle. The technique uses a value chain to generate business models from scratch, consequently providing both a common basis for comparisons and an exhaustive breakdown of the options. Although still fairly new, variations of this bottom-up technique have been used in several projects to date with good results and it was felt that it was stable enough to describe in a whitepaper and to share it with the community. Moreover when this technique was formalised during the writing phase, it was applied to existing businesses such as LinkedIn and Facebook, the iPhone and Canonical, and was seen to also be a viable technique for classifying the models of existing companies. The results are explored in a forthcoming paper at the e-challenges conference later this month. The whitepaper itself was presented last week at the Internet of Services collaboration day in Brussels, and is available free of charge at scribd. Funnily enough, as a consequence of the presentation, Jennifer Zaino from semanticweb.com then contacted me and we had an interesting chat about some exploitation best practices in general in the context of R&D projects.

So all in all, it’s been a busy few days! For more information on this check out the whitepaper and accompanying presentation on scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/66506762/From-Value-Chains-to-Business-Models and http://www.scribd.com/doc/66408751/Identification-of-Business-Models-Through-Value-Chain-Analysis-A-Method-for-Exploiting-Large-Technology-Projects-A-Whitepaper.

OpenStack in Action! - Paris, France

2011-09-29T13:01:00.004+02:00

Last Wednesday was held a one-day event about OpenStack organized by Rackspace, UShareSoft and eNovance. OpenStack is a rising open-source Cloud framework.

The project was started last year and succeeded in gathering a vibrant community and getting support from companies. It is interesting to note that OpenStack is entirely community-driven: no "self-appointed dictator for life" nor "leading industrial sponsor".

The event was structured around various presentations by the OpenStack community. The first speaker was OpenStack founder Vishvananda "Vish" Ishaya who presented the project (how it started, its architecture and gouvernance), followed by Thierry Carrez (OpenStack Release Manager) who dived into the internals of OpenStack. Dell presented their contribution to OpenStack, including Crowbar, an open-source deployment solution for OpenStack, and their new all-inclusive, turnkey OpenStack commercial package.

OpenStack will be the core of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 Cloud solution, Canonical presented their OpenStack orchestration solution "Juju". Talks from eNovance and UShareSoft were more geared towards best practices for Cloud-infrastructure management and sharing. Clouds bring more flexibility but they also change the way we manage computing infrastructures: when a node is down, you just migrate the service to another node (hence the Cloud motto: "replace, then repair"). eNovance announced the upcoming beta of the first commercial OpenStack offer in Europe.

Haïkel Guémar is software engineer at SysFera, and a veteran Fedora contributor. He is interested in Cloud computing and the new challenges it brings to manage large infrastructures.

e-IRG in Poland

2011-09-23T16:33:00.006+02:00

Now that the Technical Forum is over it's time to start looking towards what's coming up next.

In just a few weeks time e-IRG are hosting their biannual workshop in Poznań, Poland and you're all invited to attend.

The e-IRG workshops serve as open forums to present, debate, and consolidate best practices and policies for e-infrastructures and their services for research and education. The workshops are open to all, and function as incubators for feeding new information and trends into e-IRG work.

The Poznań workshop will focus on political, financial and international aspects of e-Infrastructure as well as how to develop and fund sustainable international and multidisciplinary e-Infrastructures. Expert panels will also discuss how to integrate data infrastructures with existing grid and HPC infrastructures.

For more information on registration and the agenda of the e-IRG workshop visit the e-IRG website or email the e-IRG secretariat.

EGI Technical Forum 2011 - What I Bring Back Home

2011-09-23T15:44:00.002+02:00

It has been a very intense week in both planned activities and side discussions who happened along this very rich event.

EGI Policy Development Workshop: this is the second workshop that we organised to engage stakeholders on policy matters in the context of EGI. We reported on the recent developments in both strategic, operational and technical policies in EGI. We also provided insights on Horizon 2020 (the future 2014-2020 EU funding program on research and innovation) and Structural Funds. They both are important tools that the EC will use to implement the Europe 2020 strategy (mainly the Digital Agenda for Europe and Innovation Union). The EGI partnership and individual NGIs should closely monitor these funding opportunities, align their strategies and prepare clear messages on how e-infrastructure can have long-term socio-economic impact through the results that researchers can achieve using them. K. Glinos, Head of the GEANT & e-Infrastructures Unit of the EC attended the session and provided useful insights, especially on how structural funds will evolve (more open to projects aiming at service provision and cross-country cooperation). The future workshop to be held at the next EGI Community Forum will focus more on NGIs policy development, the goal will be to gather experience from the most mature NGIs and share status and best practices with the developing ones.
EGI Sustainability and Business Models: the organisation of this workshop was very demanding but the participation and discussion was rewarding. The preparation started back in June with a survey submitted to all NGIs/EIROs. From the survey results, it was clear that there is a lot to develop in the area of business model design, that is why we proposed an educational section trying to set a common ground on business models discussion. We decided to adopt the Business Model Canvas as a tool that facilitates a focused discussion on the matter while enabling also explorations and reuse of successful patterns. The sustainability aspect of the EGI ecosystem was touched from different viewpoints: NGI (presentation from German NGI), User Community (WLCG), Technology Provider (EMI) and EGI as a whole. We will publish a short report on the workshop.
e-Fiscal Project Workshop: the e-Fiscal project, formally kicked-off last 1st August, was presented and the preliminary draft questionnaire to collect data from EGI and PRACE sites on actual costs covering 2010 and 2011 was discussed. The invited panelists and the audience agreed that the balance found in the current draft is good, enabling to collect meaningful data to evaluate the cost of e-infrastructures while not overkilling those who need to provide the answers. One of the raised questions was about reusing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) methodologies. It was clarified that the project focus is on actual costs already payed, while TCO is related to cost projections to support selection among alternative solutions.

Towards an effective e-Infrastructures impact assessment: the ERINA+ project presented a revamped methodology to evaluate the socio-economic impact of e-infrastructures and research projects and a web tool enabling self-evalution will be released later in January. The number of questions to e-infrastructures have been narrowed down to 20 while research related projects will be addressed to understand their perceived impact on the usage of e-infrastructures related to their ability to achieve faster, newer results in their work.
Tutorial: Towards better managed Grids. IT Service Management best practices based on ITIL: as part of the MoU signed with EGI.eu, the gSLM project organised an excellent tutorial introducing to the community ITIL, ISO 20000 and CobiT. The room was overcrowded, a sign of how high is the interest in learning and re-using best practices to improve the service life cycle management or the IT governance. Definitely, more work needs to be done, that is why as part of EGI.eu I strongly supported the engagement with gSLM and looking forward for more closer cooperation.
Signing two new agreements: during the conference, we finalised two new collaboration agreements. The first one with the SIENA project to collaborate on standardisation roadmaps for Grids and Clouds. The second one with the Meraka Institute (South Africa) to formalise the inclusion of resource centres of South Africa within EGI. We also had informal discussion to define details of upcoming agreements (with the DANTE organisation, the e-nventory project, the EDGI desktop grid, and the Digital Cultural Heritage user community).

Besides these planned activities, I had many side discussions and short meetings (e.g., finalising the long standing mapping of the GLUE information model into the XML Schema).

Overall the conference was very rich and fruitful and I hope that all participants are bringing back home useful results. Sometimes it was hard to choose among parallel sessions, but this is little price to pay in a dynamic and effervescent event. So, these are the main results that I bring back home.How was your experience at the conference?

Touring the CC-IN2P3

2011-09-22T18:00:00.006+02:00

On Monday, we spoke to Dominique Boutigny, Director of the CC-IN2P3. This morning, I went on a tour of the facility with Dutch delegates from the conference. The tour was facilitated by Xavier, system administrator, who gave us an extensive tour of the Tier 1 facility.

We saw the 900m² modular room being prepared to accommodate the predicted extra storage capacity. The facility also provides hot water to the new campus restaurant close to CC-IN2P3, and a 24 m³innovative water cooling is planned for the roof!

Agnes Szeberenyi on KOPI application

2011-09-22T16:00:00.001+02:00

Agnes Szeberenyi, from MTA SZTAKI, talked to Manisha Lalloo about the application KOPI and how it's set to make copying your essays from Wikipedia much much harder.

Data, data, data

2011-09-22T15:16:00.002+02:00

This year's e-concertation meeting is a little different to normal as instead of 10 minute presentations from projects, there's a chance for them to showcase their work in an exhibition.

Among the projects on show this lunchtime was PAN-data ODI, a collaboration of synchotrons and neutron sources such as Diamond and ISIS based at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. PAN-data is trying to set up a common computing structure for all of the collaborators. This would mean that their 30,000 or so users could carry out their experiments at one synchotron, maybe do some additional work at another and then access it all from a third. It sounds pretty neat to us.

ESPAS (Near-Earthspace data infrastructure for e-Science) on the other hand is trying to tackle the exciting sounding-topic of space weather and how this can impact our societies back here on Earth. But to do this we first need to know more about our space environment and be able to predict space weather - activities which both need us to share a lot of data. ESPAS is playing its part in this by improving interoperability between the many instruments involved in these calculations, trying to understand what users expect and working out how to make data understandable to everyone involved.

Another space related-project, which counts the European Space Agency as a partner, is SCIDIP-ES (Scientific Data Infrastructure for Preservation - Earth Science). This project is focusing on long-term preservation of data, such as satellite pictures of earth, and ensuring that they're stored in a way that can be reused in the future. In a nutshell SCIDIP-ES is developing software from another project - CASPAR - to see if it could be used to help preserve earth science data. It's also looking into how this data is currently being preserved and used so it can suggest how to do this in a harmonised way across the whole of earth sciences.

Phew! And that was just three projects. But it goes to show that there's a lot of work being done in the scientific data arena at the moment and still lots more to come.

SysFera-DS software demo

2011-09-22T14:49:00.002+02:00

We talked this week about SysFera-DS (open-source software for the mutualization and management of heterogeneous and distributed HPC resources).

Benjamin Depardon - SysFera CTO - presents the web interface to SysFera-DS used on the Décrypthon platform:

EGITF11 final thoughts

2011-09-22T13:10:00.000+02:00

For me, this has been one of the most stimulating events I have been to during my involvement in grid computing. Why is this? Well, I think it is because of a couple of things. Firstly, the interaction and discussions which have taken place at all of the sessions that I have attended. Presentations have been enlightening, but they have frequently initiated equally pertinent responses. Secondly, there has been a common theme of discussing how to deliver services to end users that will genuinely make the infrastructure easy to use. I hesitate to say that people are starting to think out side of the box because this is the research world and we don't have boxes but nevertheless people seem to me more ready to turn received wisdoms around and consider doing things that could make access easier, at first anyway, and reveal complexity as and when required.

In the context of user and community support track there have been a number of different discussions on the theme of simplifying access to grid-based services. Typically, we currently introduce the grid to new communities by showing off how clever, complex and secure it is, all of which only serves to convey how impenetrable the grid can be. There is an emerging consensus that we need to develop, collate and promote easier mechanisms to do science with grid-enabled applications delivered as services. Portals and other web-based services will play an important role here as will

EGI.eu has made available some mechanisms to achieve this in the form of the Applications database, the Training Marketplace and the VO services tools for VO managers. We have, this week, launched our ongoing series of workshops for users and something that has been suggested as a possible way to move forwards is less documentation but more coordination and guidance about where to find the appropriate information.

The workshops that we have run this week have all proved successful:

Data management: experiences, requirements and best practices
NGI/EGI Roadshows: discussion around the proposed Roadshow model for NGIs to adopt
Portal Technologies: a review of technologies and solutions
Virtual Research Communities: experiences and plans

Reports on these will appear shortly on Indico and also through the EGI blog channel.

Others workshops will be promoted shortly.

Most of the suggestions for this improved usability for the grid and reduction of barriers can be achieved by better integration of existing services and plans. For example, the Applications Database tools section can be improved to link applications to portals that either do or could deliver simpler access to the applications that they need to do their science with their collaborators.

We look forward to demonstrating solutions to these challenges at the Community Forum next March.

Bon voyage!

EGI Technical Forum Gala dinner

2011-09-22T12:30:00.000+02:00

As usual at this kind of event, yesterday evening we had a gala dinner.
Guess what... We were chez Paul Bocuse !
It was really good, impressive, and a bit... Special. I let you discover!

Getting every researcher digital: 80 billion euros investment announced

2011-09-22T11:35:00.009+02:00

On Monday at the EGI Technical Forum, Kostas Glinos, head of the e-Infrastructure Unit at the European Commission, introduced us to the next framework funding programme, Horizon 2020. Following on from FP7 which has given us EGI-InSPIRE, EGEE, GEANT, PRACE and many other projects, Horizon 2020 will run from 2014 to 2020, and represents an increase in funding to just over 1 trillion Euros. The Research and Innovation part of the programme is expecting to dispense 80 billion Euros, up from 57 billion in FP7.

Horizon 2020 is expected to be adopted by the EC by 30 November and will be presented at the Innovation Convention in Brussels.

Likely orientations for the programme will include seamless online services for the European Research Area, innovation and industry, human capital such as training and citizen science, the global dimension and support to societal challenges using Key Enabling Technologies.

Kostas also updated us on the work of the Geant Experts Group (GEG) which has been reviewing the set up and purpose of GEANT and the NRENs. On 4 October, the group will present its report to Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes – watch out for more news on that.

Moving towards a cloud strategy for 2012, the Commission recognises that the main issues are not technical but in areas such as interoperability, privacy, legal, governance, security and dependability. “I am glad that clouds feature so strongly in the agenda for the EGI conference,” said Kostas.

For HPC, Kostas warned that Europe has lost 10% of its HPC capabilities in the last 2 years, while Asia increased by 30% and the US by 40% - China will soon overtake Europe as a whole on the supply side. There is still some fragmentation of HPC efforts in Europe, despite the PRACE project. However, Europe still has a full value chain of HPC technologies and is strong in application software. The race to exascale computing also offers opportunities.

Open access is now enshrined in policy through Innovation Europe and the Digital Agenda – in future, it will become a condition for funding. This is just one of the challenges ahead for distributed computing infrastructures in providing e-Infrastructure as a service in order to get every researcher digital.

Users need to be more diverse, and should have access to an integrated, seamless offering. We should embrace clouds, where it makes sense to do so, and sustainability is key – the community has to develop mature business models. “It is good that these topics are on the programme at the EGI Technical Forum,” said Kostas. “The discussion one year on is more mature than in 2010’s event in Amsterdam where I handed over the signed EGI-InSPIRE grant agreement… but these challenges still exist.” It is important in the next year to develop a clear, joint vision for the future of distributed computing, supported by a fully committed community, which can be fed into Horizon 2020.

On Thursday and Friday, we are also hosting the 9th e-Infrastructure Concertation meeting, which will be discussing how to define e-Infrastructures in Horizon 2020, setting up a roadmap for data infrastructures and the next steps in Mediterranean, Africa and Latin America.

It promises to be an interesting close to our gathering in Lyon.

Globus Online - making computing easy

2011-09-22T11:25:00.002+02:00

As well as chatting to Helmut and Steve about the IGE project which hosted the first GlobusEUROPE event earlier this week, we grabbed Steve to find out a bit more about Globus Online - the latest offering from the Globus team.

Globus Online started 2 years ago as a way for smaller scientific communities which don't have the necessary expertise, time and money, to make use of Globus middleware. They've kicked off with a really easy way to transfer data on the grid - it sounds easy enough but when scientists try to move around large amounts of data it actually throws up surprisingly large amounts of problems. With Globus Online, researchers can take data off their laptop and onto the grid with just a couple of clicks and no hassle at all.

Overall Globus Online hopes to take the simplicity and ease of products created for the commercial market and apply it to the scientific world. But don't just take my word for it, watch below to find out more from Steve himself.

Win, win, win!

2011-09-22T10:19:00.007+02:00

It's the closing plenary for the EGI Technical Forum 2011 already, so that must mean that it's time to hand out some prizes.

After some very active voting at this year's event the prize for best demo is awarded to:

LINGA The Linked Neuroscientific Grand Challenge by David Manset et al from Maat France. If you missed it at the event, you can view it at http://gridtalk-project.blogspot.com/2011/09/shiwa-linga-neuroscientific-grand.html

For posters, the standard was particularly high, so we have awarded a runner up and a winner this year.

The runner up prize goes to "Virtualisation of bioinformatics applications on StratusLab", by C Blanchet et al, from CNRS.

The prize for best poster goes to "A portal for an easy access to the IGI grid infrastructure", by M Bencivenni & D Michelotto, INFN

Congratulations to all our winner and see you in Munich for the EGI Community Forum, 26-30 March in Munich!

Challenging the grid by testing its security

2011-09-22T10:10:00.004+02:00

Is launching a virus inside the grid a good idea?

Well, Sven Gabriel (Nikhef Security Officer / EGI-CSIRT) and Oscar Koeroo (Grid middleware security developer) did it, and they now explain why (there's also more info on the EGI-CSIRT below)...

EGI-CSIRT's primary goal is to provide Incident Response Capabilities across
the infrastructure,
One activity within this team is to organize Security-Drills including our
resource centres as well as Experiment job-submission frameworks.
The motivation for this is to optimize our operational set-up in order to
minimize the impact of a real computer security incident on our production.

In a distributed environment like the European Grid Infrastructure,
operational security and in particular Incident-Response has an additional
dimension, since in general a security incident happening at a certain site
will affect multiple resource centres around the globe. To contain such an
incident the activities of many teams have to be coordinated.

The crucial aspects to look at are that
- the operational set-up at the sites allows the local team to find all
relevant information, communicate the results to the central incident
coordination team and to perform targeted user-access and process management.

Using the outcome of earlier security exercises we made sure that the needed
tools are available. This has put us in a position to actually evaluate our
project wide incident response capabilities simulating a computer security
incident on a global scale, affecting 40 sites in 20 countries.

A Globus solution for Europe

2011-09-22T09:22:00.001+02:00

In 1996 Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman and Steve Tuecke developed a piece of software known as the Globus Toolkit.

Today Globus is used by science and engineering projects across the US and Europe, as well as by IT companies building commercial grid products.But while in the US Globus underpins most e-infrastructures, in Europe the picture is much more diverse. Here Globus is one middleware among many and the Globus community is quite dispersed and isolated. ‘We need to organize these efforts to speak with one voice,’ says Helmut Heller of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich.

Steve and Helmut in Lyon

This is where the Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE) steps in. IGE has been set up to act as a central point of contact in Europe for Globus as well as a software developer and a point of liaison with the US Globus team. ‘Coordination is what IGE is all about, to avoid duplication of work, and we can coordinate our efforts with the US,’ says Heller, who also acts as project director of IGE.

This Monday at the EGI Technical Forum marked a milestone in the life of IGE – the very first GlobusEUROPE event. GlobusEUROPE is set to become an annual conference, which will complement the GlobusWORLD event in the US. ‘GlobusEUROPE is an opportunity to bring people together to exchange ideas,’ says Heller. ‘It was a chance to hear about new advancements and to let users know about the European Globus Community Forum (EGCF).’

EGCF was launched earlier this year, and is a steadily growing community – ‘It’s a forum to bring together the community to exchange ideas,’ says Steve Tuecke, Globus co-founder and guest speaker at the GlobusEUROPE event. As IGE is funded by the European Commission, Heller hopes the EGCF will ensure the work of IGE continues beyond the project’s lifetime. ‘It’s a sustainability project - a community forum that will run on its own in the end,’ he says.

But building a community isn’t the only problem IGE faces. Unlike the US, Europe spans many countries and languages; data privacy is also more of an issue. And of course in Europe, Globus also has to work with other middleware providers such as EMI to ensure they’re interoperable across infrastructures such as EGI.

But Tuecke, deputy director of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab, one of the original developers of Globus welcomes this challenge. ‘At the end of the day users have adopted the tools they’ve adopted. EGI brings these together – it’s a case of embracing and bringing some order to the more diverse European environment.’

Spreading the Word

2011-09-22T08:23:00.002+02:00

As a relative newbie to the world of grids and e-science, I am interested in what outreach tools are being employed to engage potential users. At the EGI Roadshow session yesterday I found out about the UK NGS- a ‘hands-on’ road show (http://www.ngs.ac.uk/ngs-roadshows)

Over the last two years, Gillian Sinclair, Liaison Officer at NGS has been responsible for coordinating roadshows across the UK in both traditional universities and newer institutions. Twelve roadshows have taken place in total, and from listening to Gillian it is proving a successful formula in raising awareness and assisting potential recruits.

The attractiveness of a roadshows for researchers is that researchers don’t have to leave their place of work, and each can be tailored to specific research requirements. It also provides a platform to build confidence as researchers can be shown how to use the technology and what applications are appropriate/available for their research. There were a few points that highlighted in the talk.

· Give real-life examples of users. What really helps is inviting somebody from the institution to give a presentation as it reinforces the message that they too can use it. NGS has compiled 20 real life case studies.

· Ask the local institution IT person to come along.

· Try and get immediate feedback and follow up a few months.

EGI.eu is collating guidance and support resources (brochures, case studies, survey templates, lessons learnt etc.) for any NGIs interested in running roadshows at www.egi.eu/user-support/.

SHIWA - LINGA: Neuroscientific Grand Challenge

2011-09-21T13:40:00.000+02:00

Peter Kacsuk (MTA SZTAKI), and David Manset (Maat-GLINGA), are presenting us the LINGA workflow (Shiwa project).

LINGA is a challenge aiming to run across 3 international infrastructures, mixing different technologies at the same time (involving more than 2'000 CPU cores per execution cycle). It analyzes ADNI-like data from 3 continents (Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative in the US, Europe and Canada). The LINGA workflow runs the CIVET image processing pipeline onto the 3 different data sources, each of which hosted and processed within one of the participating neuroscience DCIs (i.e. neuGRID, CBRAIN and LONI). Outputs are finally rapatriated in Europe to EGI and statiscally compared along selected criteria, in order to populate distribution graphs, useful to neuroscientists.

Never too early to start science!

2011-09-21T12:22:00.003+02:00

That's what the recently launched GLOBAL Excursion projects aims at.
The main purpose of the GLOBAL excursion project is to enable students and teachers access to the experimental laboratories and resources of selected e-Infrastructures in order to improve science curricula by enriching schools' existing teaching and learning materials.

By connecting e-Infrastructures, resources and tools with schools, pupils can experience challenging and authentic learning scenarios. Thus, students gain insights in scientific real work and relive interest in natural science education.
This way they can also be involved in science at an earlier stage, and it can be easier for them to choose which science field they wish to dive more into.

So this entry is also a call:
GLOBAL excursion partnership is looking for scientific e-infrastructures ready to be used in virtual excursions.

If your institution hosts any infrastructure which can be remotely accessible for dissemination and training purpose, let me know!

Introducing our new SysFera bloggers!

2011-09-21T10:33:00.002+02:00

Considering their huge motivation, we've decided to include some new members into our permanent blogging team. To others, they are working for Sysfera, (a company developing and distributing SysFera-DS software, see below), but to us, they are experts in grid computing, and will help us to follow events, and decrypt e-science technologies...

David Loureiro is the CEO of SysFera. He holds an MSc in Applied Mathematics from EPU Lyon (formerly ISTIL). After working three years within INRIA team GRAAL (at the Laboratoire d'Informatique du Parallélisme, ENS Lyon), he co-founded the SysFera company, which
was officially created in March 2010. He likes wrist watches, old NES games and rugby.

Benjamin Depardon is the CTO of SysFera. He holds an MSc and a PhD in
Computer Science from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, and a
MSc in Computer Science from INSA de Lyon. His main interests lie in
grid and cloud computing, workflow management and big data. When he's
not working, he enjoys hiking, climbing, and pretty much every
mountain-related sport.

Augustin Ragon is SysFera's Communication and Marketing Officer. He
obtained a degree of Literary Translation from University of Avignon,
France and an undergraduate technical diploma in Computer Science from
IUT A in Lyon, France. After two years at INRIA team RESO (at the
Laboratoire d'Informatique du Parallélisme, ENS Lyon), he joined SysFera
in March 2010. He likes most team sports, rock music and bad movies.

SysFera develops and distributes SysFera-DS: an open-source software solution for mutualizing, managing and optimizing heterogeneous and distributed HPC resources and infrastructures, in particular for intensive applications. SysFera-DS offers a simple, efficient, evolutive and transparent way to make using HPC resources easier and faster for end-users and administrators. It is based upon more than 10 years of research work by GRAAL, an INRIA research team based at the LIP (Laboratoire d'Informatique du Parallélisme) at École Normale Supérieure Lyon, France.
SysFera provides tools, support and maintenance for this solution. It also proposes consulting and training courses for its customers. SysFera continuously develops new features in close collaboration with research labs and innovative customers.

Here David Loureiro summarizes SysFera activities:

Lyon Rendez-vous

2011-09-21T09:24:00.003+02:00

Suddenly we are starting day three of a very packed conference here in sunny Lyon. The EGI Technical Forum has so far proved to be a a very rewarding experience with a rich mix of participants in all of the sessions that I have attended. This has resulted in some great discussions and informative presentations. From my point of view as Chief Community Officer at EGI, I want to hear how the various research communities are getting on, what services and offerings are available for the communities and how efficiently all of this is working.

The three session Data Workshop which we ran on Monday (led by Gergely Sipos) proved to be particularly rewarding. The trigger for this and the rest of these User Support workshops is the ongoing analysis that EGI has been conducting on emerging requirements. The Data Workshop comprised three sessions; the first two were packed with a tight sequence of position papers where a whole range of experts presented their work relating to data. The first batch of these were from the EMI project, but many others contributed too including Steve Tuecke talking about Globus Online. The day ended with a fruitful discussion about the challenges relating to data in the light of the earlier presentations.

One theme that emerged was the "dissemination gap" that exists between existing technology and user needs. For a number of the declared requirements some claimed that solutions already exist. However, if solutions cannot be found and requirements are not promoted then we will not make these connections. Furthermore, software must be documented and easily available for this to happen. There was support for EGI.eu providing, or at least making available, more white papers about implementation as well as other formal comparison information on the services. But there was also discussion about the role that NGIs must play in distributing this sort of information to their local users.

There was another discussion about definitions and knowledge. We need to be much stricter and more consistent in how we categorise software and services. On example given was files - these are assumed to be persistent by some and transient by others. Context is everything, but if we cannot understand this then APIs alone won't solve the problems.

Speaking with Dominique Boutigny

2011-09-20T15:02:00.000+02:00

Dominique Boutigny is the Director of the CC-IN2P3 (CNRS).

You can find photos about the new computer room here; If you want to visit the IN2P3 computer centre during the EGI Technical Forum, there are trips 2 times a day, just ask the reception desk...

New e-ScienceBriefing out today!

2011-09-20T13:40:00.000+02:00

The EGI Technical Forum is now officially underway and it looks set to be an exciting week of discussion on grids, clouds, supercomputers and of course the science they're all supporting.

This morning Dominique Boutigny director of Lyon's computer centre, CC-IN2P3 (CNRS), spoke to us about how incorporating a cloud model into grid computing is a chance to reach out to communities who are smaller and less well structured than those in high energy physics. Clouds offer a chance to overcome difficulties in porting, complex middleware and the rigid hardware and software of grids. In fact there are a number of sessions this week looking into the EGI cloud policies for the future.

Another way to reach out to alternative communities is through desktop grids - which incorporate individual computers from people or organisations, contributing to scientific research. EDGI is the organisation to look at here - they're working hard to incorporate desktop grids into the wider EGI infrastructure.

Here at e-ScienceTalk we've been doing a lot of research into desktop grids in preparation for our next e-ScienceBriefing on that very topic. And as luck would have it, we're releasing our briefing - Desktop grids: Connecting everyone to science - right here at the Technical Forum. So if you want to find out more how desktop grids fit into the wider e-infrastructure landscape and how both scientists and citizens can benefit from the technology why don't you download a copy to read from the e-ScienceTalk website, or alternatively come and pick a paper copy up from the EGI stand.

Bread crumbs for policy makers

2011-09-20T10:46:00.000+02:00

The EGI Technical Forum has been officially kicked-off and it will be an intense week. Several interesting events are co-located with this conference and there are many parallel sessions. If you are involved in strategic planning and policy development, then here is some suggestion on sessions that will keep me busy and that you might be interested in attending:

EGI Policy Development Workshop 20/09 11:00 -12:30 to receive fresh updates on the latest activities related to policy development in EGI
EGI Sustainability and Business Models 20/09 14:00-15-30 + 15:30-17:00 to engage with the process of defining the value proposition of the EGI ecosystem entities, participate in defining their sustainability plans and related business model; the second part of the session will have a more educational focus to learn how to generate business models and have a practical example in the context of EGI
e-Fiscal Project Workshop 21/09 - 11:00 - 12:30 to address the issue of evaluating costs of e-infrastructures, a key building block to define business models
Towards an effective e-Infrastructures impact assessment 21/09 - 14:00-15:30 + 15:30-17:00 organised by the ERINA+ project focuses on defining methodologies to evaluate the socio-economic impact of e-infrastructures
Tutorial: Towards better managed Grids. IT Service Management best practices based on ITIL V3 22/09 11:00-12:30 organised by the gSLM project, is a learning opportunity to understand how EGI can benefit from best practices for IT service level management in use in the private sector.

Wishing all of you a very pleasant and productive conference.

EGI Technical 2011 reaches peak

2011-09-19T17:16:00.002+02:00

If you remember EGEE events, you should probably know what is a big event.
Well, when I arrived this morning, I was sincerely surprised to see how many people were there.
A tiny game... Could you guess how many people registered for EGI TF 2011?
The answer is just after the slideshow...

Are you still there?
Well, I don't know the exact number, but more than 600 people are going to be there with us!!!!

Arriving at the EGI TF

2011-09-19T16:10:00.005+02:00

After getting lost in the morning on my way to the EGI TF in Lyon, finally I arrived to the conference. On the 1st day I am still wandering around the posters and exhibitions.

Being a user support officer in the Hungarian National Grid Initiative, I am rather interested in applications for public usage. So I will be more or less focusing on them.

I think KOPI is really one of those applications (being a bit biased). A recent development, the KOPI - the Online plagiarism search application by MTA SZTAKI Department of Distributed System has been just announced. KOPI aims to detect plagiarism that has become a widespread issue in the field of education, mostly in higher education. The first version of the KOPI portal supported only the comparison of documents uploaded by the users. The latest version of KOPI processes periodically the entire Wikipedia with sophisticated linguistic algorithms running distributed on the volunteers’ computers in the SZTAKI Desktop Grid by SZTAKI Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems. KOPI also offers on-line cross-lingual plagiarism-search between the uploaded documents and the pre-processed WEB 2.0 based encyclopedia.

I know that many other plagiarism search tools already exist, but the KOPI is special amongst them for running on Desktop Grids, being cross-lingual and using Wikipedia. The application is being ported under the Hungarian national WEB2GRID project.

An interview of dr. A.S.Z. (Adam) Belloum

2011-09-19T15:09:00.008+02:00

Dr Adam Belloum is a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. One of the topics he covers for his students is grid technologies.
He is also a Researcher, and involved in WS-VLAM development. Ws-VLAM software is a Grid-enabled workflow management system, aiming to make grid accessible to scientists...

You're never alone when you're a clone

2011-09-19T14:29:00.000+02:00

The EGI Technical Forum has gotten under way today here in Lyon, and this is the first of a few posts which I'll be giving. I was asked to provide a different perspective than what could usually be expected, one from an "African" point of view. Indeed, this TF has a large (compared to previous EGEE/EGI meetings) African participation, thanks to the EUMedGrid User Forum, which is co-located, but the continent is still extremely under-represented in these spheres. My work over the last couple of years has been to a large extent trying to change this, focussing of course on my own country, where i coordinate the national grid, but including as well the 20-odd institutes working on the HP-funded, UNESCO run "Brain Gain Initiative".

But first let me explain the meaning behind the title of this post. I'm attending the meeting with a few hats (as I'm sure most of my colleagues are) :

Coordinator of SAGrid, to sign the MoU for resource infrastructure providers between South Africa and EGI.eu
member of the CHAIN project, representing the Sub-Saharan region (we have a closed project meeting on Tuesday)
Coordinator of SAGrid, presenting to the CHAIN workshop (overview of SA scientific applications)
finally, I'll be at the EUMed User Forum, presenting some of the work we've done in the human language research domain.

ouch.

So, I really feel like there's not enough time and not enough "Bruce" to go around. As an aside, this is a strategic issue which is being resolved in South Africa, via the CHAIN project, to develop a sustainable support and development strategy, by specifying more concrete and refined roles, and resources assigned to the people involved in the project. During this time, when the final touches are being put into place for AfricaROC, we have a lot of work to do to keep up with developments in Europe, and make sure that our work in Africa is coherent with the rest of the world.

I'm very proud to be able to represent my country in this meeting and look forward to meeting old colleagues and new. What is more, I'm extremely excited about the enthusiastic researchers in Africa who are wanting to jump on the grid. We're working hard to remove barriers to entry, and ensure that they have access to the biggest and best infrastructure possible.

Getting in training for the EGI Tech Forum in Lyon – will you be there?

2011-09-15T18:57:00.006+02:00

With only 4 days to go before the EGI.eu office packs up and heads for Lyon for the EGI Technical Forum, the last minute preparations are in full swing...

To flex my social media muscles ahead of the event, I am in sunny Belgrade for the TERENA TF-CPR meeting (http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-cpr/) for some very lively training on all things Twitter, Facebook, Flickr etc. As well as getting the low down on how to track your online clout via tools like Klout.com, we also tested out just how fast and furious live blogging can be, in an exercise on breaking a serious news story online. Not quite as hair-raising as the News of the World phone hacking debacle, but Tweeting a mile a minute certainly got the adrenalin going for most of us.

So as ever, our dissemination teams at EGI and e-ScienceTalk will be putting our skills into practice during the Tech Forum to bring events to you live as they happen. You can follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/egi_inspire and http://twitter.com/escitalk (#egitf11), plus we'll be blogging here on GridCast and at www.egi.eu/blog, posting videos at http://www.youtube.com/europeangrid and uploading the photographic evidence to http://www.flickr.com/photos/european_grid_initiative. Use the egitf11 tag if you’d like to join in… we will be showing the photostream live at our booth so we invite you to be imaginative!

See you in Lyon!

EGI Technical Forum 2011: Meet the bloggers

2011-09-12T11:06:00.060+02:00

A big hello to our team of bloggers who will be reporting live from next week's conference in Lyon!

Isabel Campos is a physicist, researcher at the Spanish National Research Council-CSIC. In EGI she represents the Spanish NGI at the Council and is a member of the Executive Board.

Oscar Koeroo has worked at Nikhef for the past 7 years in the Physics Data Processing (PDP) group on security middleware developer. He is a member of the Risk Assessment Team of the CSIRT, among other development tasks. Oscar started his career at Nikhef developing LCMAPS. Today he’s the co-developer and co-maintainer for various libraries tools like LCAS, LCMAPS, gLExec, SCAS and the EES.

Steve Brewer studied Computing and Information Systems, with a focus on IT project management, requirements analysis, human-computer interaction and has many years experience in the development of grid computing. Steve is Chief Community Officer at EGI.eu and is responsible for engaging with new virtual research communities (VRCs) to ensure that their needs and requirements are met by the evolving infrastructure.

Bruce Becker has been coordinating the national grid deployment in South Africa since 2009 at the Meraka Institute. As coordinator of SAGrid, he works closely with many South African universities and national labs, as well as coordinating the participation to FP7 projects (EPIKH, CHAIN, etc) and sub-Saharan infrastructure and research projects.

Agnes Szeberenyi is a research fellow at SZTAKI LPDS, coordinating the Grid Application Support Centre and Dissemination team. She has a background in Computer Science and Economics, and her involvement with grids started in 2004 at the 1st EGEE conference.

Sergio Andreozzi joined EGI.eu as Policy Development Manager in June 2010. He has been involved in Grid Computing since 2002, when he joined INFN to work on interoperability aspects and holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bologna and a MSc in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Pisa.

Zara Qadir has a background in Biological Sciences, and has worked within the fields of e-learning, pharmaceutical marketing and schools scientific programme and curriculum development. She is now a Dissemination Officer at e-ScienceTalk, and works part time as a freelance science writer.

Hailing from a chemistry background, Manisha Lalloo now puts her science communication skills to good use in the world of e-science. She joined the GridTalk and e-ScienceTalk teams following a stint in Brussels, helping the European Parliament promote their many events. Manisha also works as a freelance chemistry writer and in her spare time likes to dance.

Corentin Chevalier is e-ScienceTalk's technical wizard. He's specialised in website conception, (particularly flash, animations and dynamic systems) and making grid computing webcasts. He also keeps close track of new technologies and concepts, of which grid computing is a biggie.

Adrian Giordani is originally from London and has a BA degree in Software Systems and fours years of commercial experience in the online industry. Having recently completed a MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College, he is now a science writer based at CERN and covers topics about grid computing, cloud computing, super computing, volunteer computing, networks and much more.

CLCAR 2011 begins in Colima, Mexico

2011-09-07T19:09:00.000+02:00

"8 tutorials developed on Monday and Tuesday introduced the 2011 version of the LatinAmerican Conference on High Performance and Distributed Computing. The initiative of researchers, students, engineers and professors of several countries on LatinAmerica has received an important participation of different countries, not only of LatinAmerica also of some institutes in Europe.

Applied topics using intensive and advanced computing to disaster attention and environmental monitoring and modelling highlighted this year, both at the invited speeches and in papers and posters. Precisely, during the official open act with citizen and academic authorities of Mexico and Latin-America representatives, speeches emphasized on the support of advanced computing, grid computing, cloud computing to improve the quality of life for all, supporting the topics mentioned above.

Until September 9th, Colima welcomes participants and speakers with the special kindness Mexican. The variety of flavours in its food, the spectacular history, the millenarian cultural wealth and of course, the typical landscape near the volcano Colima are value added of this CLCAR 2011".

The EGI Technical Forum is on its way!

2011-09-02T11:44:00.000+02:00

September's arrived, and so has the EGI Technical Forum, which will be heading to Lyon in France on 19 - 23 September. This year the event will be co-located with the Open Grid Forum, Grid 2011, GlobusEUROPE as well as the French Grid Day, so there's sure to be lots going on.

As usual we've assembled a fab team of bloggers who will be on hand to give you a sneak peek into the conference from the comfort of your own office. We'll be introducing them to you very shortly so keep checking back to meet them soon.

In the meantime you can find out more about the EGI Technical Forum and the sessions it has to offer over at the EGI website.

EGI newsletter: Summer 2011 issue now available

2011-08-09T11:59:00.002+02:00

The Summer 2011 issue of the EGI Inspired newsletter was published last Friday, 5 August, and is available online and in pdf format.

This issue's features:

Cyril L'Orphelin introduces the latest improvements to the EGI Operations Portal
Steve Brewer reports on the HealthGrid meeting in Bristol
Richard McLennan wants everyone in the community to visit the new Training Marketplace
Rosette Vandenbroucke tells us about the newly published e-IRG White Paper 2011
Sergio Andreozzi is looking for the best Service Level Management practices
Viviane Li investigated what Lyon has to offer in preparation for the EGI Technical Forum
Sara Coelho brings you a profile of France Grilles, the Technical Forum's co-hosts

If you want to contribute with ideas, suggestions or stories to the newsletter don't forget to let us know at press@egi.eu

EU/US Summer School in South Lake Tahoe California

2011-08-08T15:40:00.004+02:00

This week I'm helping John Towns (XSEDE), Scott Lathrop (XSEDE), Hermann Lederer (PRACE), and Pekka Manninen (PRACE) facilitate the second EU-US High Performance Computing Summer School in South Lake Tahoe, California. Fifty-eight graduate and post-doc scholars from 17 countries are attending this multidisciplinary, multicultural, and multidimensional experience. I will be posting student blogs and a few of my own insights. As if we planned it that way, the Perseid Meteor Shower is highly visible this week from South Lake Tahoe. :)

The EGI Training Marketplace – Time to Spread the Word

2011-07-28T16:27:00.007+02:00

By Richard McLennan, EGI User Community Support Officer

A friend of mine lives in one of those luxurious third floor Amsterdam apartments overlooking a picturesque canal in a smart part of town. For many months the street light outside the apartment failed to work but it was not until her gleaming new Yamaha Supersport motorbike needed to be parked securely on a well illuminated spot outside that she took a personal interest in getting the lamp fixed. A little research and a telephone call or two put her in touch with the right City Council maintenance department and within 24 hours, that Amsterdam street lamp was repaired and the Yamaha was securely parked under a bright spotlight. What has any of this got to do with the EGI Training Marketplace? Well, like so much in life, this story is all about the importance of effective communication - the case of repairing a street light is really very simple but nothing can happen until the right ‘someone’ is told that the job needs doing. The same is true for the EGI Training Marketplace.

A short while back I wrote an article for the EGI Blog page in which I compared EGI’s new Training Marketplace to a form of ‘ebay for grid training’. The portal had gone live on 7 June after a good deal of development work by a small team at STFC, UK. Having been personally involved in proposing, testing and fine tuning the product, I was convinced that all that remained for it to become a huge success was for me to tell people how good it was and then to sit back and watch the portal hit rate grow. After all, ebay itself already is a huge success story. Just as it provides a web based framework through which a constantly growing community of buyers and sellers get in touch with each other to exchange something, so the Training Market place provides a web based framework through which ‘grid computing’ training and training needs can be advertised so that those who seek specialist training can find what they need ….. in theory.

So, back to fixing street lights. The way things get fixed – lights on streets, in offices or even in our homes - is by waiting a long time for ‘a miracle to happen’ or alternatively, by playing an active part in the process and thereby making it happen quickly. More often than not we just need to ‘communicate effectively’ for someone to start whatever process we need to happen. The Training Marketplace seems to have remained largely untouched for a couple of months now and while it stands a chance of becoming successful if we all wait for long enough, I am sure that there is much better way. With around 18,000 registered grid users who either need or can provide specialist training, our Marketplace needs little more than to become well known. So here is the reason for this article: did you know that the Training Marketplace existed and that it is accessible through the EGI UCST Webpage? Have you set up any training events which could be promoted via the Training Marketplace? Even if the training event is closed to your own community, it may still help others to know about your training event. Go on, play an active part in putting the spotlight on your training, your training needs and our Training Marketplace.

Bird-brained computing at TeraGrid

2011-07-21T02:03:00.006+02:00

And a final note from TeraGrid about birds before I too fly the coop tomorrow, to Chicago. At the very end of the science session today, Daniel Fink of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology talked about modelling avian distributional dynamics on TeraGrid. Basically, bird watching with big computers.

So why birds? First of all, they are very good bio indicators, the so-called canaries in the coal mine, that can tell us about the health of the environment. Second, there is lots and lots of data - people love birds and there is a vast archive of amateur bird-watching data dating back over decades. One example of this is the citizen science website, eBirds (ebirds.org).

When you’re gathering observational data of this type it needs to be comprehensive – species, place, date, time, and how long did it take how many people to gather the data. This last one is particularly important as it gives you information on how much bias might be involved in the information.

Data sets can contain up to a million hours of volunteer data BUT it can still be sparse in terms of geographical coverage. You have holes in it where there aren’t many observers. Fink and his team are working to help fill the gaps and predict occurrence by associating observations with local environmental data. They’ve tried this with some very different bird species such as the indigo bunting and the solitary sandpiper and it seems to work. For example, their models of indigo bunting distribution show holes in the distribution patterns corresponding to cities. Which is what you would expect from a species that prefers hedgerows and rural environments.

Fink showed off his BirdVis tool that has recently been accepted for publication, where you can scroll through the influence of habitats during breeding periods and during migration, over dynamic time frames – all very impressive.

And with that, I must fly!

The sunset of Teragrid and the dawn of XSEDE

2011-07-21T01:33:00.005+02:00

As the sun sets on the TeraGrid era, the horizon opens up for the future of XSEDE, described John Town picturesquely, leader of the new project XSEDE: Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, part of the National Science Foundation’s eXtreme Digital program. Towns, from NCSA, outlined the road from Teragrid to XSEDE at the TeraGrid11 plenary this morning. Over its ten years, TeraGrid provided a lot of resources but was particularly characterised by the high level of help and support available to users. It mainly supported the NSF, but also other agencies such as DOE, NIH and NASA, in a wide diversity of fields including physics, molecular biosciences, astronomy and many more.

With TeraGrid closing, a new program was needed – XD or eXtreme Digital. There were two proposals submitted and XSEDE is the successful combination that has been awarded funding. The start has been delayed for around a year beyond the expected date, but is now up and running. The vision is to enhance the productivity of scientists and engineers but in a shift in emphasis from TeraGrid, this vision doesn’t specifically mention HPC - although it is vital part. To give you an idea of the scale of funding, the Training, Outreach and Education activities will be allocated around $3 million dollars a year for 5 years.

XSEDE has been out to speak to communities to gather their needs up to 2015. Earth science, for example, are looking for support for their cybershake work in earthquake modelling involving a few big parallel jobs, and many thousand loosely coupled jobs. Others such as iPlant, that is solving grand challenges in plant science, need high speed access to data in databases scattered in different places, plus an HPC component to do the analysis. Brain science, including the Human Connectome Project aims to understand the wiring of the human brain, a hugely complex problem. They will have Petabytes of data to archive and stream in near real time at 1 GB/s.

As for TeraGrid, XSEDE’s focus is on user support services. They want to be able to respond to requirements quickly, so have money set aside in the budget to hire in experts in the short term from external sources. They will also be relying on their network of dozens of Campus Champions who provide onsite expertise. The TEOS team will be providing particularly intensive support to 5 to 10 campuses a year to help this along.

As far as architecture is concerned, they will be moving forward carefully, based on standards. They are currently documenting the architecture – ‘describing the elephant’ as Towns put it, but from the perspectives of different stakeholders eg service provider, sys admin, power and occasional user, gateway developer, security officer, NSF program manager, campus champion, trainer etc etc.

Connecting with users is also of key importance. They will use the tried and tested methods of trouble ticket tracking, focus groups, user interviews and ‘shoulder surfing’, watching how users interact with the services. However, they are also setting up a User Requirements Evaluation and Prioritisation Working Group that will help them to prioritise requirements through the direct participation of stakeholders. XSEDE is planning user focused workshops and users will be represented in the governance structures of the program, through the XSEDE Advisory Board, User Advisory Committee and Service Providers Forum.

Interesting times ahead!

How to build a better portal at TeraGrid11

2011-07-20T00:46:00.007+02:00

It's the first official day of Teragrid and we’re all pleased to be here - it's hard to fault a conference that welcomes you with a generous cooked breakfast and free Starbucks coffee!

This morning we heard from Nora Sabelli of SRI International, with a thought-provoking talk on how we prepare for the future of data and compute-driven modern science.

After the break, I joined the Training, Education and Outreach track in the 'Solitude' room. Fortunately, despite the name, I wasn't alone and the session had drawn together an impressively wide range of people - scientists, developers, outreach specialists and teachers, among others.

The session covered using portable apps to help lower the entry barrier to grids. Richard Knepper, of Indiana University, presented his imaginative investigation into the affiliation networks of Teragrid users, based on their social network use. Training projects have the widest network, and project leaders tend to be grouped together in disciplines, although a few seem to be involved in a huge number of projects (I think we all know a few people like that!)

Jeff Sale of the University of California San Diego, also gave us the benefit of his experience in building cyberlearning communities. In his time, he has created portals for teachers looking to base lessons on real data, for grid campus champions and for students.

He has used a range of commercial and open source solutions to construct the portals, including a mix of content management systems, learning management systems, such as Moodle and full blown grid portal toolkits - basically, they're all mash ups.

A veteran of developing community focused portals, Jeff let us into a few of the secrets that he's learnt over the years. First off, define your goals and your measures of success clearly from the outset - don't just stick a portal in at the end of a proposal because it sounds like a good idea.

Secondly, you need to have adequate funding - for both start up AND sustainability. Also, don't forget that if you build it they will not necessarily come! Setting up a portal as a way to nurture a community sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn't. You need to plan a strategy for outreach and bring the right people on board to do this. Developers are not always the best communicators of their work....

You need to know your community – their technical ability, their online social skills. Identify community leaders and the ‘supergeeks’ (or perhaps more kindly, beta testers) who will help you with the development. Don't experiment with the whole community, you’ll probably scare them away.

Get the technology right and use it appropriately. Younger communities, such as students, are ‘digital natives’, and many social networking plug ins are available for the already initiated. There are also several ‘out of the box’ solutions around such as Joomla, Mambo and Drupal, but you might need to hack around in the coding to get exactly what you want. Be creative, and learn some PHP and Flash. And last but not least, you should practice what you preach and use the technology yourself!

Under the Salt Lake City clouds for TeraGrid and OGF32

2011-07-19T00:08:00.013+02:00

This week I'm at Teragrid and OGF32 in Salt Lake City. Living in the Netherlands, I thought I was used to flat, open landscapes, but the vista here is on a completely different scale.

Flying in on Sunday after a dash up from the South of France on Saturday, I unfortunately missed a lot of OGF32, but was able to join the workshop on Science Agency uses of Clouds and Grids on Monday. It's been a pretty intensive day, with 21 different snapshot presentations, so it's a difficult workshop to summarise (particularly when my body clock now thinks its roughly Tuesday). So here are a few snapshots that I've picked up on in between caffeine hits during the breaks...

David Wallom of Oxford University updated us on the SIENA roadmap effort, and pointed out a key quote for the standards community from Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission:

"International standardisation efforts will also have a huge impact on cloud computing. Open specifications are key in creating competitive and flourishing markets that deliver what customers need. Europe can play a big role here – building on, for example, the SIENA initiative and its development of a 'standardisation roadmap for clouds and grids for e-Science and beyond'."

SIENA has surveyed the standards work being done by the various DCI projects, and is now working on a gap analysis. You can download their roadmap to interoperable infrastuctures at http://www.sienainitiative.eu.

Ruth Pordes of Open Science Grid introduced OSG and outlined their Virtual Organisation structure - I was intrigued to hear about some of their multi-disciplinary VOs, which seems to be a growing trend. OSG is also considering how the cyberinfrastructure landscape will change now that XD XSEDE is replacing TeraGrid. Could they have a role as cloud brokers?

EGI.eu's Steven Newhouse talked about the federation of virtualised resources from an EGI context. Discussions are now focussing in on key usage scenarios such as running a predefined VM image, running "my" VM image (with the user's own data), how to decide which virtualised resource to use, how to manage accounting across resource providers, including monitoring reliability/availability of these resources and notification of VM state changes.

Daniel Katz of the University of Chicago gave us a run down on the open challenges for production DCIs. The goal is to deliver maximum science but the discussion is always around sustainability. We need to achieve useful work but ideally with someone else paying for it! Another issue is how can we measure delivered science? We can track papers and citations but these are blunt instruments for measuring impact. Another challenge is to develop tools that allow the infrastructure to deliver maximum science. Currently we do this well on a case by case basis, but offering scientists an off-the-shelf set of interoperable tools is still a bit of a dream.

Kate Keahey, Argonne National Laboratory, showed us the Nimbus cloud project, which is working with hybrid clouds ie combinations of private, community and public clouds. Nimbus allows users to build turnkey dynamic virtual clusters based on these resources, and to try out applications that don't work on the grid, such as very complex non-portable software. According to Kate, cloud outsourcing is now no longer a choice. Benefits of clouds are their economy of scale, flexible access to different resources and lack of operational overheads but before picking a cloud, you have to consider a host of factors - is it scaleable, easy to use, cost effective?

That said, clouds are definitely changing the patterns of how people work.

The Teragrid11 event proper starts tomorrow. The hot topic in the US at the moment is the transformation of NSF's TeraGrid program, which has provided cyberinfrastructure resources to the research community for more than 10 years, into XSEDE - Extreme Science and Engineering Digital Environment.

More tomorrow (or whatever day it is where you are!)

SC-CAMP 2011 Starts!!

2011-07-11T15:32:00.002+02:00

"Under the shadow of the Turrialba Volcano, thirty students from different Latin-America countries and seven instructors from the world will be in the 2011 version of the Supercomputing and Distributed Systems camp for a week.

This year, the world's happiest country is the host of this initiative for researchers and PhD students to other students of master and undergraduate programs in computer science and scientific carriers. Costa Rica is one of the most "green" country of the planet (may be the most one), ecological conscience is placed in all of their habitants and the Turrialba site offers exotic trees and different extraordinary birds that every morning with their songs awaken all SC-CAMP participants.

SC-CAMP 2011 topics are addressed to large scale distributed systems profit. Day one was the introduction to large scale architectures, day two is the HPC day, third day is the Grid and Virtualization day to know and enjoy Grid'5000 platform. Wednesday will be the free day to visit the Turrialba's archaeological park, Thursday is named the HPC Boot day, to make several practical sessions in special topics of programming large scale distributed systems. Friday, the Contest day and Saturday the Hot Topics and Green Day, to finish the camping school with the towards on HPC and large scale architectures and a reflexion about HPC green computing.

SC-CAMP is promoted by LatinAmerican HPC-GRID Community with the support of different regional and world institutions, such as the case of Red CLARA, Grid Cast/ISGTW as media partner and more."

Answering the big e-questions

2011-07-07T15:50:00.000+02:00

The 7th White Paper of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group has just been released! It addresses some of the most interesting questions related to new and on-going e-Infrastructure challenges, such as:

-How do we deal with the increasing energy demands of computing?
-What software is needed to fully harness the power of future HPC systems?
-What are the appropriate governance models for e-Infrastructures?
-How can we facilitate access, discovery and sharing of large and diverse sources of scientific data?
-How can we further advance research networks, and adopt and implement new e-Infrastructure services?

Seven topics have been carefully chosen by the e-IRG delegates with innovation providing the common thread throughout the document. “Existing e-Infrastructures need to look with a critical eye at their current governance model when preparing for innovation” says Rosette Vandenbroucke, White Paper editor and e-IRG delegate.

The White Paper 2011 also reflects upon the future role and development of Research networks. A sound development of Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting is also handled as well as Energy and Green IT – an important topic on many management agendas. Supercomputing continues its spearheading innovation, but can we go from T-flops to P-flops and can we really and efficiently use such a computing power? Services are another part of e-Infrastructures of growing importance. Which services should be delivered and with what quality? Finally, the intriguing topic Data infrastructures is addressed, with a few recommendations for the setup of European data infrastructures.

“The e-IRG White Paper 2011, especially the written recommendations in the end of every chapter, should be taken into consideration by governments, in particular ministries responsible for research, funding agencies and the European Commission. It is however also of interest to individual researchers and users of e-Infrastructures as an incentive to let their voices be heard”, says Rosette.

You can access the e-IRG White Paper 2011, at the e-IRG website. A summary of comments gathered during the White Paper consultation phase in spring 2011 is also available on the website.

e-ScienceTalk signs an MoU with EGI

2011-06-29T14:42:00.003+02:00

I’m very pleased to announce that on 23 June e-ScienceTalk signed a Memorandum of Understanding with EGI-InSPIRE. This formalises the fruitful working relationship that already exists between the two projects.

The agreement was signed by Steven Newhouse, Director of EGI.eu and myself as project coordinator for e-ScienceTalk. EGI.eu is the coordinating partner for projects.

“One of the key aims of EGI is to enable access to computing resources for all scientists in Europe and we are working actively to increase the scientific diversity of our users,” said Dr Newhouse. “But for that we need to communicate the benefits of grid computing and this is where the e-ScienceTalk project can help.”

Our goal in e-ScienceTalk of course is to increase the visibility of European e-infrastructures in the wider world. To achieve this, we work to raise awareness of the contributions that distributed computing has made and continues to make to solving the scientific and societal challenges facing us today. We aim to share success stories and case studies with a wide variety of audiences, from the general public to policy-makers.

Our collaboration with EGI.eu will give us access to Europe’s leading scientific grid infrastructure community and we will do our best to let everyone know about their achievements.

Technology Enhanced medical education and collaboration

2011-06-28T19:03:00.003+02:00

Hello again

Today it was more about medical education and collaboration in healthcare.

In one presentation, the need for multiple repositories of digital resources, additional description and uploading of resources in medical education was discussed. The solution in linking and searching structured data would be semantic web, so as to create typed links between data from different sources.

Another presenter talked about the semantic MediaWiki, an interface implemented like a Wikipedia web-based tool to be used by users who don’t know how to browse, search and query medical interventions. As an example, the presenter showed an impressive demo of a European project for Mind and Body Fitness for Life and which combines cognitive and physical activities, the Long Lasting Memories, which you can also test yourself (www.longlastingmemories.eu).

Another presentation talked about using education theory to design a patient and health education system capable of increasing health literacy. The reason for this is that information only is not the issue, but using the information correctly and applying it is the main point in health education, especially since we all tend to selectively believe (what we want to believe).

Another presentation showed an innovative health information system currently being implemented and evaluated in Lesotho. The idea is to help the national health system adopt computer-based solutions to help reduce HIV prevalence, in a country where challenges include paper-based health systems, limited resources, lack of connectivity and power, and high distance between health centres. Following a positive evaluation, the program is planned to scale up to another 8 countries.

In another presentation from Norway, a research took place to improve how nurses in hospitals communicate with each other and how such a communication can be prevented from becoming an interruption. This is especially important when a nurse is in communication with a patient. As creating a ‘context sensitive phone’ seems to be far from real, the presenter showed results from replacing older systems with systems that allow group awareness, and how one nurse’s actions interact with other nurses’ ones.

Good continuation and hope to see you next year!

A different look at healthcare

2011-06-28T16:00:00.000+02:00

This year's HeathGrid conference is being co-located with CMBS 2011 - the 24th International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems.

Listening to the CBMS talks is a bit of a change for me as I usually go along to conferences that deal with DCIs (distributed computing infrastructures). But today I've heard all about how computing is assisting medical decision-making, as well as how it's dealing with the different ontologies used in the profession.

In this area computers seem to more often be used to assist work of doctors rather than to replace their existing way of doing things. For example, in a talk this morning, we were shown an automated medical decision support system which can help doctors to diagnose diseases. The system uses information provided by misdiagnoses to associate diseases with related symptoms so, the next time a diagnosis is made, it can suggest diseases that are likely to be the cause. A key feature of the system is that it learns from the experience of doctors' past decisions, which are entered in every time a disease is diagnosed. If a doctor uses the system for a year, it will gain a year's worth of knowledge, and can be used to assist those with less experience.

A following presentation dealt with a project that used mobile phones to record ECG beats in patients suffering from cardiac disease. In developing countries, with limited hospital bed spaces, this could help clinicians to monitor patients remotely. Patients would wear an electrocardiograph which send information via bluetooth to their phone, and ultimately to the hospital via a 3G connection. However, in Brazil for example, there are 3G shadows, meaning that real time monitoring is impossible in some areas. So the project we heard about is trying to transfer the ECG analysis onto the phone itself, which can give prediagnosis to the patient or paparmedic in an emergency.

All in all it's been quite an interesting morning. I'm looking forward to learning more at the sessions ahead.

e-Science in Asia

2011-06-28T09:00:00.001+02:00

Over the years HealthGrid has developed close relationships with Asian researchers, through initiatives such as WISDOM, which has been used to help find drug targets for malaria and to monitor the evolution of the flu virus.

So it seems like an appropriate time for us to release our new e-ScienceBriefing, which takes a special look at distributed computing in the Asia-Pacific. As well as healthcare, Asian-Pacific researchers are putting grids, clouds and volunteering to good use in regional problems such as averting massive damage and loss caused by Earthquakes.

You can read more about how these technologies are developing and being used in this region by reading the briefing on the e-ScienceTalk website. Or if you're lucky enough to be in Bristol at HealthGrid11 pick up a copy from the table outside the lecture hall or from the cafe.

digital payback

2011-06-27T22:29:00.003+02:00

Rossel Apostolov, from KTH, turned Vincent's comment around:
for the grid you do not need a credit card

End of conference 1st day at U+WE in Bristol

2011-06-27T21:51:00.002+02:00

Hello to all!

This last session today was for Cloud Computing in HealthCare and Biomedicine. The first speaker, Dr Nick Papanikolaou talked about dealing with privacy and security in cloud computing. The resources grow and sink as the needs require, as such cloud computing is about elastic access to resources. Privacy can pose a challenge as rules and regulations differ in different countries and may conflict with each other. For example, when one rents a cloud, there is not necessarily any guarantee where the data will be stored. The user has no control over the data which can be used for unauthorised purpose, whereas in case the data is stolen or misused there is no compensation provided. Some of the solutions discussed include a cloud computing information assurance framework, trusted computing, encryption of cloud storage, just in time decryption, obfuscation and virtual private clouds.

Dr Hanene Boussi Rahmouni discussed about the concerns in worldwide healthcare and medical research, including cost, quality, agility and exchange of expertise. The cloud offers solutions to the first 3 problems but the issue of privacy and security still remains. A governance framework is required whereby metrics will help ensure measurable and by-design compliance for both human and system processes.

Luciano Floridi completed the discussion on the ethical challenges of cloud computing. Ownership is being more and more ‘deflated’ as more and more people tend to share and exchange resources whose ownership and maintenance is unnecessary and unwanted. Addressing the digital divide then comes in the picture, meaning availability, accessibility and also usability of resources. The cloud offers opportunities as it is affordable, dependable, safe and fast. For the problem of privacy, accountability is proposed whereby users’ actions are traceable and their identity knowable by the provider.

Dinner time, see you tomorrow!

Key notes

2011-06-27T20:21:00.007+02:00

Today two keynote speakers took the podium at Healthgrid.

In the morning Richard Sinnot from Melbourne spoke to an interested audience (including his mother), about the impressive amount of e-research activities down under. His tip: it's not so much about the "e", but the "r"

In the afternoon Vincent Brenton from Clermont Ferrand reminded us of the first steps of the HealthGrid conference, organization and vision. Most of all, he emphasised the human dimension: don't lose the heart and keep going!

A morning at HealthGrid11

2011-06-27T17:23:00.001+02:00

Afternoon!

I've spent this morning sitting in on HealthGrid11 in a (slightly sunny) Bristol. The morning kicked off with a rather lively talk from Richard Sinnott the Director, eResearch for the University of Melbourne, and, for me, was followed up with a number of presentations on data sharing and security in HealthGrids.

In this session we heard from Dagmar Krefting of the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin who is working on the PneumoGrid project. PneumoGrid is applying grid technologies to the sharing and data processing of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). COPD encompasses a number of conditions such as chronic bronchitis and emphysema which limit the airflow in lung sacs and affect breathing. Its main cause is smoking and - despite a number of global anti-smoking campaigns - it still causes 5% of all deaths, and has been estimated to be the third leading cause of death in 2030.

Dagmar's project is concerned with aiding the diagnosis and treatment of COPD. Doctors often treat the condition prescribe asthma-type sprays or breathing exercises. But how can they tell how well these treatments are working?

To do this patients are often monitored by attaching microphones to their chest, to listen to their breathing, and also through dynamic MRI using special contrast agents. But these techniques are very data intensive and also require a lot of analysis.

Like many other projects which deal with these issues, PneumoGrid uses the grid to provide a solution. Grids also allows clinicians to share data with each other. But this presents a problem - how to balance sharing vs privacy.

A way to ensure that patient data is kept safe is to anonymise it but this is a one-way street. Once identity information is removed, there's no way back, which makes it completely useless for treatment. So we have to use pseudoanonymisation instead. However this doesn't eliminate all risk. Reidenification can still occur if someone gets access to enough data about a person or if the reference information is discovered.

PneumoGrid has therefore separated the grid environments from the hospital environment and introduced a trusted third party in the middle to resolve this. Three other techniques - centralised pseudonym management, pooled temporary pseudonyms and twofold pseudonymisation - can also help prevent identification.

This goes to show that sharing health records is a massively hard task. But, with the amount of data we're now able to collect on healthcare, it's essential to solve, if we'd like to move towards better diagnosis, treatment and care of patients.

We're going to HealthGrid

2011-06-24T17:49:00.000+02:00

Keep your eyes on GridCast next week as on Monday and Tuesday we'll be in Bristol for HealthGrid11.

We've been to HealthGrid for the last two years and it's a great chance to find out just how distributed computing is playing its part in helping to improve the world's health. This year the conference has special focus on cloud computing.

Check out the programme for HealthGrid here which includes an intriguing after dinner talk from Professor Peter Barham on the science of tast and flavour. I can't wait!

HealthGrid11: Meet the bloggers

2011-06-23T10:12:00.000+02:00

On Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 June 2011 we're going to be at HealthGrid11 in Bristol, UK. Having covered both HealthGrid09 and HealthGrid10 in the past we're excited to find out what new developments there've been in the world of distributing computing and healthcare.

Guiding you through the conference will be our helpful bloggers. Find out about them below:

Niobe Haitas is Quality Assurance Manager at for the HealthGrid initiative. Her work experience concerns international development projects and European Projects, including management and dissemination.

Silvia Olabarriaga is head of the e-Bioscience group at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam. Her current focus lies on e-infrastructures for biomedical research, in particular interfaces for end-users.

VENUS-C Open Call - And the Winners are ......

2011-06-08T16:16:00.002+02:00

In the 5 years that I have been working in distributed computing never have I been so excited as the Launch of the new VENUS-C Pilots tomorrow 9 June. The pilots have received seed funds to run their apps on the Cloud following an overwhelming response to the Open Call launched last February. Amidst such high competition, the final 15 were selected as the most compelling in the context of VENUS-C goals. And what a selection it is with apps spanning architecture, biology, bioinformatics, chemistry, earth sciences, maritime surveillance, mathematics, medicine and healthcare, physics and social media.
It’s good to see some old friends from EGEE and EDGI also on board.
Open Call Winners
Aristotle University - Department of Computer Science, Greece
Aristotle University - Geophysics Lab, Greece
Athena Research, Greece
CESGA, Spain
CIEMAT, Spain
DFRC, Switzerland
Heriot-Watt University, Scotland, UK
Molplex, UK
Royal Danish Academy, Denmark
Royal Holloway, UK with the University of Essex
Stockholm Brain Institute, Sweden
University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland with the University of Geneva
University of Cyprus, Cyprus
University of Malaga, Spain with Risc Software, Austria
University of Westminster, UK

Over the next few days, we’ll be meeting the new pilots, hearing from some of the pioneers behind VENUS-C from both Europe and the U.S. with hands-on training taking centre stage on Friday morning. And of course, we’ll be having lots of fun!!!!!!!

Special thanks to our hosts at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center in Brussels.

Launch of new VENUS-C Pilots: Meet the bloggers

2011-06-08T15:14:00.000+02:00

From tomorrow, GridCast will be bringing you the latest news from the Launch of the new VENUS-C Pilots, which is taking place in Brussels on 9-10 June.

We've got a fab team of bloggers from VENUS-C who'll be on hand to cover all the action. You can meet them below:

Stephanie Parker has a background in interdisciplinary research in the Arts and Humanities with a keen interest in innovative technologies for business and science. Stephanie works for Trust-IT Services Ltd and is now Dissemination Manager in VENUS-C with a focus on building and supporting user communities of Cloud computing.

Sara Garavelli has a background in Telecommunications with expertise in B2B business intelligence and innovative services. Sara brings a forward thinking and fresh approach to ICT web-centric communications.

Ignacio Blanquer is professor at the Department of Computer Science, Universitat Politècnica de València, and member of the Institute of Instrumentation for Molecular Imaging. He is currently the user community manager in the VENUS-C project and has a proven record of user support and application porting in High Performance and Distributed Computing infrastructures. He is the coordinator of applications in the Spanish Network for e-Science and member of the board of directors of HealthGrid. He has been involved in projects like EGEE and EELA.

SESERV project to hold Workshop: “The Future Internet: The Social Nature of Technical Choices”

2011-06-06T16:16:00.004+02:00

By Malena Donato Cohen, Atos Origin

The SESERV project studies, analyzes and fosters a thoughtful debate to help shape the Future Internet, of which cloud and distributed computing are an integral part, through concentrating on Socio-Economic aspects.

SESERV, aka Socio-Economic Services for European Research is a 2-year European support action project selected by the European Commission to be funded through FP7.
SESERV kicked off in September 2010, and its goal is to bridge the gap between those who study and those who “build the Internet” – or shape the Future Internet - by supporting discussion and debate within a multidisciplinary community of researchers and professionals working on Future Internet Socio Economics.

Motivation
The motivation for SESERV is that nowadays the Internet has become a central part of social life. People use the internet to communicate, to express ideas, and even more with the increasing importance of social networking and interaction to build relationships. The internet and its architecture will be enhanced to meet societal challenges and evolve as society develops. People not only use the internet but have become without a doubt truly internet-dependent. The Internet has evolved and grown to an unprecedented and unique size and such changes have an impact on the evolution of society. Thus, the Internet of the future is facing some challenges, as there are an increasing numbers of users, providers, services, and so on, and it needs to be shaped and defined to meet user demand and needs.

The goal
Thus, in this project, the aim is to discuss and analyze what the socio-economic challenges and future trends of the Future Internet are. And the idea behind this project would be to help to maximize the impact of research by raising the awareness of socio-economic trends in the areas of incentives, accounting, Digital Europe, and risk management ,whilst, at the same time, addressing possible policy priorities within the research community across key dimensions of the convergence of information technology, telecommunications, and media.
SESERV was inspired on the back of the Future Internet Assembly (FIA), which is a European initiative looking to define and shape the Future Internet. FIA grew out of collaboration across diverse research projects seeking to maintain European competitiveness in the global marketplace. As such, the SESERV project looks to engage with the FIA community to co-ordinate discussion from a socio-economic perspective for Future Internet development.

The Workshop
Project partners are studying the work done shaping the Future Internet through white papers, research consultancy and workshops created across the collective of research projects. In this context, SESERV is holding a workshop at the end of this month (June 28th) that intends to set the basis for an open and deep discussion about shaping the Future Internet, and where stakeholders will describe how the latest technology developments are facing socio-economic realities.
People from different profiles will attend with the idea of fostering open discussion and debate to shape the basis for the future of the internet, such as experts in FI technology, researchers, academics, social scientists and economists, and policy experts. Particular attention will be given to the methods and approaches that facilitate the creation of multidisciplinary networks of collaboration and knowledge exchange.
The event will offer an opportunity to analyze how to understand the future of the Internet as a platform that can foster innovation, collaboration and knowledge transfer. The results of this event will be written up as a whitepaper, and considered for possible publication.

SESERV will host the Workshop on: “The Future Internet: The Social Nature of Technical Choices” next June 28th in St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Click here for further information

Project web site: www.seserv.org/

e-Science in a virtual world

2011-05-26T13:48:00.002+02:00

Yesterday the e-ScienceTalk team (the folks behind GridCast) took a trip to Kings Cross, London, to present a session at the British Science communication conference 2011.

The British Science Communication conference is a great opportunity for people working in backgrounds such as universities, charities, science centres and more to discuss and share the ways they communicate their science to the wider world.

We took the chance to introduce our new e-ScienceCity, which will build upon the award winning GridCafé website - offering visitors the chance to learn not just about grid, but also cloud, supercomputing and volunteer computing technologies. And we've been working with Oliver Battini, of Virtus, to bring this all to you in an enhanced 3D world, care of New World Grid.

Our iSGTW editor, Jacqui Hayes, also discussed the problems of having a difficult to pronounce name as well as the ways online science newsletters can incorporate interactive elements to promote conversations with their readers.

You can take a look at New World Grid, host to our new e-ScienceCity below. And stay tuned for more developments coming soon!

Networking with the networkers

2011-05-20T09:22:00.004+02:00

While the rest of the GridCast team have been over in Trieste, I've been spending the week in Prague at TNC2011. TNC2011, organised by TERENA, is all about networking. It's a topic I'm pretty new to so it's been a bit of a learning curve, but one thing is very evident. Networking is not just about cables.

Taking a quick look at the conference programme for this last week backs this up. Sessions ranged from the switch to IPV6 to privacy and anonymity. There's lots of great ideas and innovations coming out of this area - in one of the most popular talks of the week (from the Twitter comments anyway) Roland van Rijswijk of SURFnet demonstrated how we can use QR codes on websites such as online banks to provide a secure and simple way to authenticate users. Individuals simply take a photo of the QR code with their smart phone, enter a pin number into their phone and gain access to the site. What's even better is that the open source tiqr app, which enables all of this, is now free for download for both Android and iPhone so anybody can use and apply it to their own authentication.

This year's conference marks the 25th anniversary of TERENA - a period of time in which the internet has revolutionised many aspects of the way in which we work and live in unexpected ways. So naturally the question that's been on everybody's lips is - what do the next 25 years hold? I spent the first half of this week in NREN sessions (FYI an NREN is in charge of a country's national research and education network) where discussion about the changing roles of these bodies was a hot topic. Opinions differed but everyone agreed that users now don't just want connectivity - they're looking for an end-to-end service, and providers need to adapt to offer this. For example GÉANT's Autobahn service gives users an easy way to request dedicated bandwidth.

The e-infrastructure world is a very dynamic environment, thanks to increasing globalisation, distributed science and education costs, and the NRENs present at TNC2011 all agreed that if they're not able to react in time, they are in danger of being left behind. In fact, change was a key theme throughout the conference - none more so than in the excellent closing plenary talk given by John Wilbanks of Creative Commons. Like all of the TNC2011 sessions, John's talk can be watched in the online video archive. It's fairly lengthy, but definitely worth it. John argued that in the way content-led industries such as music and newspapers are finding themselves changing due to the way users now consume them, science and research are sure to follow. The internet has allowed this because of its simple, open common network approach, which lends itself to growth, and encourages a culture of sharing. And although sharing can sometimes be seen as a bad thing, it's something we're inherently driven to do and drives innovation, reuse, and social benefit.

Ultimately this is what Europe's e-infrastructures have been set up to do - to share research, data and ideas. So while, from an outsider's perspective, it may seem like it's all about technology and cables, those in the know realise it's actually just about connecting people.

Wrapping up the e-Infrastructures and climate change conference

2011-05-19T14:22:00.005+02:00

Coffee’s been drunk, interviews have been filmed and much has been discussed over a beer (or two), but where have our few days in Trieste left us? Filippo Giorgi, Head of Earth Systems Physics at ICTP helpfully wrapped up the meeting for us in the final plenary session.

“Why do we need large infrastructures for climate change?” Giorgi asked the assembled room. You can read this question two ways of course – what kind of things do we want them to do, but alternatively, do we need them at all for this kind of work?

To answer both of these questions, he took a look back over the previous sessions and reminded us that the Earth is one of the most complex systems in nature – probably exceeded in complexity only by the human brain. Climate can be influenced by factors that are human in origin, such as aerosols, greenhouse gases and changes in land use, but also by events that are entirely natural, including volcanic eruptions and solar variation.

Back in the 70s when I first (dimly!) remember ‘global warming’ making the news, global models for climate change only considered a few elements, such as carbon dioxide and rainfall. Today these models include a dizzying range of interconnecting inputs, including interactive vegetation, sulphates, rivers, air chemistry and many more. To double the resolution of the models you roughly need to increase your computing power by a factor of ten – according to Moore’s Law, you can only achieve this every 5 or 6 years.

As we heard from the Africa Adaptation Programme yesterday, it’s extreme events such as floods, droughts and so on that cause the most damage in both human and economic terms. So for climate scientists, it’s important to understand the ‘long tail’, or what happens at the fringes of normal climate behaviour – this is why increasing the resolution of your models at a local level is so crucial.

For politicians, as anyone who followed the media storm around the COP events in Copenhagen and Cancun will remember, it’s the uncertainty of these models that causes the problems. Small changes in the assumptions you make before you run a simulation can lead to huge discrepancies in the predictions for the years ahead. And there are also competing models, so not every climate scientist will arrive at the same answer from the same starting point.

So to come back to the original question, why do we need e-Infrastructures? According to Giorgi, there are two ways to approaching the problems. You can effectively build an LHC for climate science, the ‘billion dollar’ approach – ultra high resolution models, considering a huge variety of factors but making predictions over shorter time scales. Or you can take a large multi-model approach, which gives you a lower resolution but longer term view using less intensive computing power. You also need to consider how to scale down global scale models to that crucial local level.

There are a range of platforms to choose from depending on the approach you take – earth simulators, volunteer computing such as through climateprediction.net, the PRACE HPC network or grid computing as offered by EGI and others. These are all still up for discussion, but Giorgi’s point was to make sure that you fit the computing to the question you want to answer, rather than make your models fit the ‘big iron’ you might have to hand.

And finally, a cautionary note that is being heard across many areas of science at the moment – data. Climate science generates vast amounts of it. Where do you store it and how do you share it? To be meaningful, analysis needs common formats, agreed metadata, a common set of variables and visualisation tools. “The problem of data may be even larger than getting computing time,” warned Giorgi.

Sara Pittonet

2011-05-18T19:06:00.003+02:00

Sara Pittonet is one of the Project Managers in Trust-IT Services Ltd.
She is also blogging for us on GridCast!

Professor George H. Philander

2011-05-18T18:06:00.000+02:00

Professor George H. Philander is the Director of African Center for Climate and Earth System Science, in Princeton University.

Update on Africa

2011-05-18T17:16:00.005+02:00

We are drawing to the end of our all too brief visit to Trieste, and we're very pleased that so many speakers have been available to stand in front of our e-ScienceTalk cameras and be interviewed. Our booth has also been busy- I’ve never seen pens and brochures be so popular!

This afternoon we have heard some news from Africa from our generous hosts ICTP and from the Africa Adaptation Programme. Dr Onime from ICTP (http://www.ictp.it/) told us about their most recent initiative to support research in Africa. ICTP is 90% funded by the Italian government, and Trieste is actually one of the major centres for science in Italy, with the Elettra synchrotron and other institutions just down the road. In partnership with UNESCO, ICTP are developing a research infrastructure for Africa that includes HCP.

The aim is to create two centres for climate modelling in Ethiopia and Ivory Coast, an HPC atomistics science centre in Cameroon and three training centres. They have already worked with Addis Ababa University to set up a cluster – next stop is the University of Cocody in Ivory Coast.

The Africa Adaptation Programme (http://www.undp-adaptation.org/africaprogramme/) sees climate change as not just a scientific but also a socio-economic and political problem. Especially when it comes to disaster recovery – they estimate that 96% of events, 99% of casualties and 50% of economic damage in the region is due to disasters that are hydro meteorological in origin.

Climate modelling means moving from global to local scales, over time periods of days to decades. Not an easy task, and the AAP initiative has funding from the Government of Japan until 2012 to address the problem. Covering 20 countries, AAP aims to improve government planning and policy making, provide support for leadership development, find innovative funding solutions and set up region-wide databases.

On a practical level, they get involved in helping national projects while they are at an early stage, assist with accessing, collecting and analysing data on climate change, and help to build capacities in ICT and infrastructure. Part of this includes establishing early warning and decision support tools, driven by automated remote sensing stations and sensors. Taking a leaf from WLCG’s book, they are planning to set up a tiered infrastructure, possibly with the Tier 0 located here in Trieste.

Finally we heard from EuroAfrica-ICT (www.euroafrica-ict.org) who aim to put African research partners in touch with other, with a view to participating in EC funded projects. GridCast already attended their conference in a rather chilly Helsinki in December last year. The next cooperation forum on ICT research is planned for November 14-15 in Cape Town. Hopefully it should be slightly warmer!

Mohammed T. Dawoud

2011-05-18T17:06:00.000+02:00

Mohammed T. Dawoud is a System Engineer, and he is working for the EUMED-Grid project as Site Administrator.

Dr. Sylvie Joussaume

2011-05-18T16:16:00.000+02:00

Dr. Sylvie Joussaume is the Director of the National Institute of Sciences of the Universe, in France

ONE-DAY E-INFRASTRUCTURES WORLDWIDE TOUR

2011-05-18T10:44:00.006+02:00

The first day of conference gave us the opportunity to learn more about e-Infrastructures employment and potential towards the understanding of climate change all around the world.

A long one-day trip, opened by the keynote speech of Kostas Glinos, Head of Unit Head of Unit GÉANT and e-Infrastructures’, European Commission, DG INFSO was done, starting from Asia, where the Taiwan situation was illustrated by Simon Lin of the Academia Sinica in Taipei, to India with Professor Dash presenting the Indian situation.

Latin America was included too, Brazil situation and the activities which the GISELA consortium is carrying out were highlighted by Diego Carvalho (Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica).

D. Qian, from Beihang University explained the China National Grid (CNGrid), and last but not least, Tiwonge Msulira Banda, UbuntuNet Alliance, gave an interesting speech about the Sub-Saharan African situation of grid infrastructures.

US and Europe were presented, too, thanks to the interesting contributions by prof. Balaji, Cooperative Institute for Climate Change, Princeton University, Steven Newhouse of EGI, and Sergio Bernardi for PRACE initiative.

After this world trip, the conference landed again in Trieste, in the romantic atmosphere of the San Giusto Castle, were all the participants met for the conference dinner in the castle Terrace enjoying a beautiful see sight of Trieste.

The Castle of San Giusto was built on the remains of previous castles and its construction took almost two centuries (1470 - 1630). Today the castle has many rooms open to the public. In the castle of San Giusto there is a civic museum with old weapons and it is also a place where exhibits and open air shows are held. Walking along the terraces of the castle you can see a lovely view of the city, the sea and the hills. The Parco della Rimembranza (Rememberance Park) was built to honor the memory of those who died in WWI.

Gala diner in Trieste...

2011-05-18T10:28:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we had a wonderful gala diner in Trieste. Remember it is for scientific/journalistic reasons...

Gilberto Diaz interview

2011-05-18T08:56:00.000+02:00

Gilberto Diaz is the Supervisor General of Operations in Red de Datos de la ULA (REDULA), and he talked to us about his preferences for scientifique computation...

Discussion with Chandan Maheshwari

2011-05-17T18:06:00.000+02:00

Chandan Maheshwari, from the Pune University Campus, India, is a Project engineer for advance computing. He is a grid computing user, and he Adrian Giordani talked to him about this technlogy, among others...

Simon Lin on the Climate Change Research

2011-05-17T16:16:00.005+02:00

Simon Lin is the Responsible for the ASGC (Academia Sinica GridC Computing Center).

He answered Adrian Giordani's questions at the conference on
the Role of e-infrastructures on Climate Change Research in Trieste

The European Grid Infrastructure and climate change

2011-05-17T12:29:00.004+02:00

This week I am in Trieste for the Role of e-Infrastructures for Climate Change conference at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. EGI and e-ScienceTalk are very pleased to be co-sponsoring the event, which gathers climate change and e-infrastructure experts from all corners of the globe. I am particularly looking forward to hearing the perspective of speakers from India, Africa and the Asia Pacific region.

One of this morning’s keynote speakers, Dr Steven Newhouse, Director of EGI, first gave us the European viewpoint, including an outline of what the European Grid Infrastructure provides to climate change science. One of the guiding principles behind what EGI offers is ultimately to be a neutral resource provider: any application, any domain, any technology. This means providing a platform for innovation that is targeted to specific domains, whether high energy physics, life sciences, or in this case, climate change.

If you look through the EGI Applications Database, it shows many applications in the areas of Earth Science. EGI can help to make the relevant data accessible, supporting discovery, access, processing and archiving. This can include data from many sources, such as satellite data from GENESI-DR, and earth-based climate data.

One particular example in the area of climate change is the enviroGRIDS project, which is contributing to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). It uses web-based services to share and process large amounts of key environmental information in the Black Sea Catchment, which covers 24 countries and 160 million inhabitants. The main aim of the project is to assess water resource in the past, the present and the future, according to different development scenarios.

The Black Sea Catchment is of particular interest because poor water management in the past has led to a range of environmental problems, including pollution of surface water, excessive algal growth and accelerated erosion. Problems like these can lead to human health risks, degradation of biodiversity, economic decline, and reduced availability of water. One of the tools offered by the enviroGRIDS portal is SWAT (Soil Water Assessment Tool). This provides a hydrological model that can predict water resources, sediment, and chemical yields in a specific watershed, using weather, soil properties, topography, vegetation, and land management practices as input data. The impact of the way the land is managed on water quantity and quality in complex water systems can then be predicted, and practices adjusted if the outcome is likely to be poor.

So for climate change as well as in other research areas, the aim of EGI is to provide what the end user needs and to implement the technology changes required to support this. In effect, the Virtual Organisations that work with EGI will decide what services are deployed and where, allowing them to manage their own deployed infrastructure. The outcome will hopefully be positive not only for the users of the infrastructure, but for everyone impacted by climate change as well.

Conference on "Role of e-infrastructures for Climate Change Research"

2011-05-17T10:16:00.002+02:00

Conference on "Role of e-infrastructures for Climate Change Research", from ICTP in Trieste, Italy, started this morning. We're going to cover this event for you, so stay in touch!

Climate change... What about climate change?

2011-05-17T09:35:00.003+02:00

My trip to the ICTP conference on the role of e-infrastructures on climate change research has already provided some surprises. First I flew in a propeller-powered plane, which was a turbulent flight to say the least. Second, my guesthouse is next to a clear-blue sea and third, they have breakfast, lunch and dinner available – what more could you ask for!

Now, where’s the beach... I mean, the next presentation on scientific computing’s role in climate change.

... I’ve found the first presentation room – the Leonardo Building – and our booth with all our e-Science Talk posters and memorabilia boxed-up. I arrived here by shuttle, but I’ve heard there is a scenic walk which I will do at some point. Oh wait, I have to set-up and unpack everything now.

But, before that the first delegates to arrive were welcomed by Alberto Masoni, EU-India Grid coordinator and INFN research director, and he encouraged them to think about how e-infrastructures can help climate change research. We were all then provided with an ice-breaking ‘drinks and nibbles’ evening.

This allowed me to have stimulating conversations with Diego Carvalho, coordinator of the GISELA grid, about his work in trying to teach GISELA’s not-so-technical users on how to use the grid. He said that it can be challenging trying to identify general competences that worked across various communities, as each user is different.

Another interesting fact I learned today was from Joseph Intsiful, a climate scientist from the African Adaptation Programme who highlighted that scientific data shows the majority of natural disasters and human deaths, as a result of climate change around the globe, are due to hydrological effects – the movement, distribution and quality of Earth’s water. I said “Really” and he said, “The data is out there to support this”. Let’s see what else I’ll learn at the conference.