Escape To Victory

Some more tales from the EGEE/Gridtalk team about the journey back home.

The last day of any conference is usually pretty laid back, this one was a little different as it was the last "hurrah" for EGEE so the mood was bitter sweet with a few "final" farewells said. However as news came filtering in about the volcano and the subsequent delays, the mood was relatively jovial. A lot of people weren't flying till Friday so there was some gentle ribbing of the people "stranded" with expectations they'd be off on the first flight Friday, how wrong we were.

In total 5 of us headed down to Stockholm that evening, 3 knew they'd have been in Stockholm that night, 2 didn't. The mood was optimistic and it was assumed this would all blow over (hopefully literally) in a day or two. By Saturday lunchtime it became obvious this was not the case, so Gillian, Manisha and I spent 4 long hours in front of laptops. We eventually beat the internet, the train schedules and hotels into submission. We had decided we were not leaving Stockholm till we had a clear path to London and we had succeeded.

On paper the journey looked both simple and convoluted. How many trains were we going to be using? How many countries would we see (albeit one fleetingly out of the train windows)? In the end the lovely people at SJ (Swedish Railways), Deutsche Bahn and Eurostar would take us from Stockholm to The Capital in a mere 38 hours. Messers Ibis and Nebo would provide the beds (there had to be beds, I'm getting too old for sleeping in train stations). We would wind through northern Europe: Stockholm -> Malmo* -> Copenhagen** -> Hamburg* -> Hanover* -> Cologne* -> Brussels** -> London. The only problem with the plan was it wasn't going to start till Monday evening so we were "stuck" in the beautiful city of Stockholm with good food and great company. I even got to celebrate International Record Store day by seeing a friend (Gareth Smith of Victims and ex-Raging Speedhorn) do a low key DJ set at the Noise Pollution music shop. The weekend wasn't exactly the definition of one of Dante's circles of hell.

When Monday rolled around we had one last wander around Stockholm and jumped on our train just before 6pm and we had stocked up on snacks and beer for the journey to Copenhagen. I would love to say the platform was rammed and the train some kind of living hell but I have gotten rush hour trains to the 'burbs in London. Actually the train was pretty quiet, plenty of room and there was a spirit of camaraderie among the passengers (despite some having already made the trek to Stockholm from Moscow). When we got to Malmo we had to swap trains (something about safety on the Oresund bridge) but it was also the first of our impromptu meetings. Gillian's friend lives in Malmo and came to meet her on the platform for the ten minutes we waited for our new (smaller and less nice) train to take us to our first hotel and the Danish capital, Copenhagen (or Koebenhavn according to our train tickets).

This was the site of our next meeting John Kewley from NGS met us off the train as he had seen our itinerary on Facebook, was in the city (trying to get home himself) and knew where our hotel was (beside his). Once checked in we exchanged some stories of our travels (and other's plans) over beer (me), hotdogs (me again), baguettes and noodles. We bid John farewell that night, he was taking a different route to the UK, and headed to bed. During our research for our return it became obvious that Copenhagen was the gateway out of Sweden to the rest of Europe so it shouldn't have surprised us that while waiting for our train the next morning we bumped in to Ruediger from EGEE who was getting the same train as us.

Now this train was an experience, overbooked and rammed with massive suitcases (guilty), it took us an hour just to find our seats and get the interlopers in them evicted (chancers). However we got settled in and ready for the next few hours when there was an announcement in German, thankfully repeated in English. "The train will now board the ferry and once on all passengers will need to leave the train and return only when we have docked on the other side". A fair point no hanging out in the ferry hold during the crossing only one problem, what bloody ferry? OK it may seem obvious to get from Denmark to Germany you possibly need to cross some body of water and with hindsight (and Google maps) it's even more so. However we (and Ruediger when we met him on the ferry) were blissfully unaware of this. The process was painless in the end; the train rolled on to the ferry (new one on me), we wandered round the boat for 30/45mins and back on the train.

It got a tiny bit bizarre at this point though. Deutsche Bahn had organised extra carriages for the extra passengers, the one problem? You couldn't get at them by walking through the train. Cue a mass of people rushing past our window with bags, suitcases, children and a kitchen sink (I may have made that last one up). Once that was sorted we started our move to Hamburg 15 minutes late but we weren't bothered we had a long transfer time in Hamburg. This is the point where the announcement (again in German but thankfully repeated in English) over the PA says "The train is being held here as the police investigate an animal on the tracks which was hit by the train before us". Really? You couldn't make this stuff up. In the end it only held us up for 15 minutes but we were getting a touch anxious (we were carting a good few bags around).

Thankfully not only was the platform change simple at Hamburg but the train was amazing. We had been forced to get 1st class tickets for the rest of the day and this was our first taste. The train was extremely quiet so actually had our choice of seats but Gillian and I opted for the dining car where we had dinner at a real table, with real cutlery and real glasses (full of beer for me). We didn't even end up using our seats and the trip to Hanover was over way too soon. However this was our tight swap over, we had 8 minutes to get to our next train and we busted a gut through the busy Hanover train station only to realise we'd swapped platform in 2 minutes so had room to breath and time to watch the display countdown our train's arrival. This is where the journey started getting hectic, thankfully we had seat reservations (which are taken very seriously in Germany) all the way but baggage space was at a premium and our bags spent a lot of time in very different places to us. The rest of the journey was suitably uneventful, we made it to Cologne with time to spare, forced our way on to a cattle train there (so it seemed) which took us to Brussels and our final destination that day.

The dazed look on our faces in Brussels Midi said it all really. We were wiped and we could not have survived another leg that day. We had got on at Copenhagen at 9:45 and got into Brussels at 21:30, 12 hours was as much as we could take and we crashed into the Ibis across the road, stuffed some food into us and hit the hay. Tomorrow our Eurostar was at 7am ....

Despite the god awful start time Wednesday saw the three of us uber-chipper as we were one step away from The Capital and a lot closer to our beds than we had been 24 hours earlier. There were no surprises for us, the queue for the check-in, security and passport control were massive, but the train wasn't packed and we had a restful journey under the channel and through the chunnel. However when we got into London there was one more meeting with an EGEE refugee, Robin McConnell had also seen our itinerary on Facebook and came to meet us as he waited for his train to Edinburgh. He was travelling light for his last leg, his suitcase had been pinched from his coach in Victoria station. A kind of unique "Welcome to England" for him.

Well that was our story, I don't want to do any more travelling any time soon (like that's my choice) but I think we ended up doing very well and had no real mishaps. It also gave me a taste of travelling in Europe by train I may do it again this summer but I'll not to squash it all into 2 days. There are some more images from our time in Stockholm and the journey here.

Later days,
Neasan

* = Change trains, ** = Overnight in hotel

Planes, trains and automobiles – how did you get home from Sweden?

For many of us the EGEE 5th User Forum in Uppsala will live long in the memory. The excellent food, stunning conference venue, Linneaus’s dry wit and the faultless organisation made it a particularly bright star in what has been a glowing galaxy of EGEE events over the years. For some of us though, there will be other reasons why Uppsala will take a while to fade – all thanks to a certain volcano in Iceland. As the ash clouds rolled over Europe and airspace progressively clamped shut, many of us were faced with some tough decisions – sit it out and wait, or try to get home by other means, fair or (often!) foul.

The corridors back at EGEE HQ have been buzzing with our own stories of travel epics as weary colleagues have gradually trailed back into the office – we’ve also heard some tales from others of you on the road and we’d like to hear more. How did you get home? Are you still en route? Who had the longest trip back or were you one of the lucky few who jetted out just as the ash blasted in?

For five of us from the Project Office, Sunday morning in Stockholm dawned clear, still without a plane in the sky, so we decided to launch ourselves into the uncertainties of the public transport system. After struggling with ticket offices and online booking systems stretched to breaking point, we emerged slightly tussled but clutching bus and train tickets as far as Geneva. After what felt like a last supper in the Viking hotel, and fortified by a glass or two of the aptly named ‘Railroad Red’, we all piled on to overnight coaches at Stockholm station, wincing slightly as the doors squealed shut on us for the next 8 hours. Dawn saw us crossing the Oresund bridge towards Copenhagen, glad that the end of the first leg was in sight after a back-breaking journey, peppered with 3am conversations about guinea pigs and unsuspected pregnancies with slightly eccentric co-passengers.

Copenhagen station was awash with anxious travellers – coffee was available but of dubious quality, and trying to avoid being charged to hastily brush your teeth when you had nothing but Swedish krona in your pocket was an added hazard. We crammed onto the platform with other ex-User Forum refugees to fight our way onto the train –sadly the first class tickets that had been the last ones available were not enough to get us a seat, or at least not more than one between the five of us. To say that the train was ‘standing room only’ would have been over generous – there was barely room even for that. After four and half hours, with a very welcome break during the ferry crossing to stretch our legs and remind our lungs what fresh air felt like, the train eased into Hamburg station. The next challenge after many hours of inactivity – to cross several platforms at a dead run, complete with baggage, to where the next train down to Basel was impatiently waiting for us. Train caught, we relaxed into the luxury of actual seats to ourselves and watched the sunny German countryside slide past for the next six or more hours.

With a sense of reaching the home straight, at nearly 9pm, the train approached Basel. Or so we thought. In fact Basel has two stations, only one of which allows a connection to Bern. We got off at the wrong one. With six minutes to spare, we leapt into taxis to try and make the connection (avoiding the temptation to yell ‘Follow that car!” in best filmic tradition). Another luggage-laden dash down the platform followed, just in time to watch the 21.03 slide out of the station with only two out of our party of five on board. Disappointed! Another tedious wait for a train to Bern, a thankfully easy transfer to the Geneva train and we were finally rattling our way to Cornavin, at well past midnight and 26 or more hours into our journey. Trailing back to our cars, we said goodbye to our travelling companions of the last day and a half and agreed that it might be a while before we ventured back to Uppsala again!

As we travelled, we had heartfelt sympathy with everyone else on the road, trying to get back to the UK, Thailand, South Africa, the US, Israel and other far flung places. We'd love to hear more about your own tales of travel and derring do on the road from Sweden - small prize available for the best travelogue or most complicated route!

We leave with a bang... not with a whimper

The closing session of the last EGEE User Forum is over.... and after delightful week in sun-soaked Uppsala the EGEE UF 5 has come to an end with a bang. The bang in question being the eruption in Iceland of a volcano that has sent a cloud of ash over Europe and disrupted flights for the next 36 hours at least. For me, and I'm sure many of the attendees, we have at least an additional day to experience lovely Uppsala. For some perhaps a whole weekend!

The meeting itself marked the end of a 9 year period of experimentation and prototyping of production e-infrastructures in Europe that started with the European Data Grid and ended with the Enabling Grids for E-Science (EGEE-III) project. Ahead of us lies the challenge of a new beginning - building a sustainable European wide production e-infrastructure from a federation of integrated National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) and resources from European International Research Organisations (EIROs).

The User Forum itself demonstrated again the diversity of the user communities using the European Grid Infrastructure. Over the years a compelling service offering has developed to support data intensive science. The challenge facing EGI is to determine where this service offering has to be adapted to meet the requirements emerging from the ESFRI projects. Many of these were part of a technical session during the meeting and a few participated in the exhibition. I hope to see many of these projects return to the EGI Technical Forum in Amsterdam during 14-17th September along with many new ones.

I hope your transition from EGEE to EGI is a smooth one, and if you have any onging concerns please contact me at director@egi.eu.

What would Linneaus do?

Long-term persistent storage, a technology challenge of global proportion

One of the highlights of visiting Uppsala, Sweden for the recent EGEE User Conference, was learning about Carl Linneaus. Born in Uppsala, Linneaus was a cornerstone for the university. He died in, and was laid to rest in Uppsala Cathedral—the largest cathedral in all of Scandinavia. Linneaus was famous for being the first botanist/physician/researcher to consistently apply Latin binomial nomenclature to plants and animals, thereby initiating what has become a universally implemented method of species classification. Uppsala University has lovingly preserved much of Linneaus’ field research—specimens and documentation--for future generations to mine.

It is the year 2010 and you are a molecular biologist who is on the brink of finding a cure for a disease that has affected millions of people. You are leveraging technology in ways that make the best and brightest computational scientists take note. Everywhere you turn, funding agents give money to support your research. Funding agents like to give money to support advances in science that will transform the lives of many. You are awarded tenure at your institution. Your discoveries are published. You put forth hundreds of students who have learned your techniques. You retire well, and live in the south of France.

Flash forward 250 years. You are a nanomolecular biologist who is attempting to find a cure for a new disease. You would love to get your hands on the computational research of those who worked on a similar strain of the disease in 2010, but the data is no longer available. Although the computational power that is available to you is far greater than that which was used in 2010, much of the effort expended over the lifetimes of those scientists who committed their research to digital files is lost. You can, however, read Linneaus’ field notes at Uppsala University.

The architecture of digital storage changes every 20 years or so. Storage costs money—power to cool the systems, media on which to store it, and therefore a commitment by an institution, scientific domain, or government, to protect and preserve the data for future generations to mine. Most institutions struggle to meet their administrative data management needs. Many commit to storing academic data for the tenure of the professional, or a period of two years (maximum) beyond the termination of a contract.

Perhaps Linneaus was lucky in that he contributed to society before this situation rendered it impossible to preserve and protect academic research for generations to come. In practice, preserving paper in a museum is much cheaper. Linneaus would have used hand laid paper or animal vellum. Writing would have been done with indigo ink. By virtue alone, these materials would stand the test of time. Today, if we do commit something to paper, it is most likely printed on uber-ephemeral recycled paper--the fibers of which are short, put through a bleaching process, and bound together with an acidic medium. Toner and vegetable inks fade, and paper that is designed to self destruct is not the best way to preserve anything.

This week, while having the opportunity to chat with those who operate many of the world’s technology infrastructures, it seems as though we all share the same problem. Most technology has a five-year life span at best. Many infrastructures are built and sustained by cycles of four or five-year funding streams. When you think about it, how could a long-term, international, data repository be funded? Where would you house it? Who would you trust with the contents? Which set of security policies would you apply, and how would you sustain the natural evolution of progress? Who wants to be responsible for the world’s data anyway?

The year is 2030 and I have passed away. My grandchildren are rifling through a box which represents my life. Dozens of USB memory sticks, CDs, and floppy disks hold the writings, images, and evidence of my existence--but they don’t know that. They have never seen a floppy disk, let alone a device that would read one. Therefore, these trinkets will most likely be turned into a piece of primitive jewelry, made into Christmas ornaments, or sent to the trash for an archaeologist to find, or not.

Clouds of ash

I never thought I'll be blogging from a coach in the midst of Swedish woods. Neither I ever imagined I won't be able to get from one Swedish town to another by any mean because of a volcano eruption in Iceland. The Nordic EGEE User Forum ended with a truly Nordic specialty - on Thor's Day the Norse gods decided to demonstrate their implementation of clouds. A powerful one, but really useless. I only hope this will not overcloud the Forum outcomes and will turn out being a good sign for all the newly starting projects featured in the final session. At times it seemed as if "G" in EGI should be tipp-exed into "C" to follow the suit.

Well, let's see: suppose Grids will be able to provide service so stable and reliable, customers will be prepared to pay cash. And suppose Grid user interfaces will be able to capture and virtualize any working environment, be it a Windows PC or a 1000-processes strong parallel application. Will these Grids stop being Grids and become Clouds? Or now suppose different Clouds will decide to federate their resources across administrative domains and will have to introduce ROCs and GGUSes - will they become Grids? Perhaps the next conference will show. Hope there are no volcanoes in vicinity of Amsterdam.

SAGA, an API which accommodates gLite, ARC, UNICORE, and Globus

This morning I attended a session with Shantenu Jha, Louisiana State University, about SAGA--a simple, stable API which accommodates multiple middleware platforms, including gLite, ARC, UNICORE, and Globus. SAGA, together with a suite of resources, including Ganga and Diane, makes it possible to achieve concurrent access to EGEE, TeraGrid, and other infrastructures. According to Jha, there are currently hundreds of unique users of SAGA per month. Most are from the high energy physics realm, but about 30% are non-HEP applications which include Bio, Fusion, and various engineering fields of research. SAGA was demonstrated in Barcelona at the EGEE ’09 user conference. RENKEI (the Japanese word for “Federation”), an eScience project of Naregi, the Japanese Grid Initiative, has developed an entire standards-based stack around SAGA. They will demonstrate their use of the tools at the Open Grid Forum meeting in Chicago, June 22, 2010.

For more information, see SAGA: http://saga.cct.lsu.edu

Director of EGI.eu announced!

As the EGEE project draws to a close, the EGI search committee is pleased to announce that the new EGI.eu Director has now been officially appointed. The foundation in Amsterdam, which will coordinate the European Grid Infrastructure from 1st May, will be led by Dr Steven Newhouse, Project Director of EGI-InSPIRE and Technical Director of EGEE. As the final event of the EGEE series of projects draws to a close, everyone in the EGEE project office would like to congratulate Steven and wish him all the best success in his new role.

Winners of the best demo and poster competition announced!

In the closing plenary session this morning, Vangelis Floros of GRNET and Chair of the Programme Committee announced the winners of the best demo and poster competitions, as voted for by delegates. As always, the quality of demos and posters was very high.

For Demo session 1, the winner is "neuGRID- a grid brained Infrastructure to understand and defeat Brain diseases", presented by David Manset of maatG and Yannick Legre of HealthGrid. You can watch the GridCast video of the demo at
http://gridtalk-project.blogspot.com/2010/04/healthgrid-demonstration.html. NeuGrid's own video is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpfD6GZ90tQ.

For Demo session 2 the prize goes to "Applications using Remote Instrumentation in Grid environment DORII project" presented by Marcin Plociennik of PSNC and Milan Prica of Sincrotrone Trieste. Again, if you missed the demo you can see it on the GridCast site at http://gridtalk-project.blogspot.com/2010/04/dorii-demonstration-applications-using.html and on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgk_SZbWkEY.

Out of the high quality posters brought to this closing event of EGEE, delegates selected their favourite - poster 25 "Programming gLite without an UI" by Maximilian Berger of University of Innbruck and Thomas Zangerl of KTH.

Congratulations to all the winners!

MPI, and parallel jobs, and conference roundup

The morning session on parrallel processing was mostly updates on the progress of getting MPI working reliably. John Walsh was talking about the task force, and how the number of sites that publish that htey support MPI has gone down slightly - but the number of sites where it actually works has gone up. The monitoring processes checking MPI jobs has helped significantly with that.

The next talk was about where to next, and giving the users the ability to control more things - there are several different categories of parallel jobs, and it was good to see explicit consideration being given to them. There's not a fixed timescale mentioned for implementation of these - during the immediate transition, there'll be a focus on documentation (rather than changing things); which is a very sensible plan.

Parallel tasks are the big area for us, where we get the most request that we can't quite do; I think we'll be working in this area for a while.

That's the last session of the parallel sessions [0], so everything it starting to close down now, before the closing plenary.

Overall it's been a good conference; with lots of cross talk between users and techy types, which is the the key thing that doesn't happen elsewhere. Even with my flights home being cancelled (looks like it's going to be a long weekend ... and not in the holiday sense!), it's been good to be here.

I think the key theme running through the conference is to do with the end of EGEE, and the changes. With then general sentiment being, "All that good stuff? That's not going to change", I hope the transition is as smooth as it looks like it will be.

[0] Pun intended, of course.

What is important for you this week? (Attendees comments part III)

“The most interesting thing for me this week was the session on novel technologies, and how people are coupling cloud computing and grid computing. This is one of our research areas, so this session was important for me,” Francisco Brasileiro Francisco Brasileiro, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Brazil

“I'm here to present the project 'On demand Grid services for high education and training in Earth observation,' funded by the European Space Agency, we are in the final stages of the project. We're taking this opportunity to target the user community interested in earth observation, for monitoring environmental problems. For us, this is one of the most important events where we can meet both users and developers,” Dana Petcu, from West University of Timisoara, Romania.

“Three things. The most important thing I want to get out of this week is to understand how the transition from the current infrastructure to the EGI infrastructure and the EMI software providers will work. The second thing I'm looking to see is how emerging technologies like clouds will impact the infrastructure. The third thing I want to understand is which new user communities really depend on the infrastructure because up till now I was only aware of the high-energy physics community really depending on it—as in having no other resource,” Markus Schulz, EGEE.

“There are a few reasons why this week is important to us, first we are sharing our work with our colleagues. We are also observing the work of our colleagues, the progress, the solutions to common problems and then also to see where we going. Whether we are going in to a bright future or whether we are going in to a wall. It seems the truth is somewhere in the middle,” Andrei Tsaregorodtsev, Marseilles Centre for Particle Physics.

Hotel Uppsala's Pipes of Scotland, Kungsgatan 27

Although I’ve been under the weather and not able to go out at night, this place is in the hotel where I’m staying. A steaming bowl of their Scottish-style Skink Soup is quite satisfying and will make you sleep like a baby. You are probably thinking, ‘I know what a skink is, and I certainly wouldn’t want to eat one on a good day—let alone when my stomach has gone south.’ It helped me to know that, according to Google, Scottish Skink Soup is made from Haddock. Theirs has a smooth cream base, fresh, floating button mushrooms, and loads of flavor. They also have a beautiful beer tapper with 14 varieties all served with a smile, by (from left) Marie, Christin, and Lina.

For those of you who are going out tonight, Lina tells me that the night life continues one block west of Hotel Uppsala on Dragar Brunnsgatan and then one more block to the west on Svartbacksgatan.

Earthquake disaster mitigation demo

Watch below to see Yi-Tao He's demo of earthquake disaster mitigation on EUAsiaGrid

DORII demonstration: Applications using Remote Instrumentation in Grid environment

Marcin Plocieunik from PSNC, Johannes Watzl from LMU Munich and Alexey Cheptsov from HLRS Stuttgart are presenting a concrete application using Remote Instrumentation in Grid environment:

Transition model

So it was said yesterday at the dinner, "EGEE is dead, long live EGI!" Indeed, transition from one structure to another is on everybody's mind. And the Nordic location of this User Forum can provide an interesting opportunity to learn about different infrastructure models. The Nordic BioGrid talk on Tuesday offered the first glimpse into specifics of the Nordic DataGrid Facility and its model of user and application support. Two talks from Finland on Wednesday will add to the picture; I particularly anticipate presentation of the Material Science VO, as it is quite different from the "traditional" HEP community. On a related note, a live demo of gLite-ARC interoperability in the framework of the Swiss GRIDSEED project will show the potential of a more loosely coupled infrastructure, enjoying freedom to deploy different solutions depending on user requirements.

Nordic countries pioneered a truly distributed infrastructure built by service providers from different countries with minimal centralized intervention. We built a highly efficient Nordic DataGrid Facility that is based on very heterogeneous comuting resources. We deployed a distributed storage facility that acts as one storage "cloud". And we even have our own middleware, ARC, that makes all this possible. True, none of these achievements are due to EGEE, which explains a rather low profile of Nordic contributions at this Forum. But it surely should be an important input to EGI, and to me looks like a perfect transition model.

Lydia Maigne demos Sentinel

The Cancer Sentinel project is a grid network for distributed medical data management of cancer. Watch Lydia's demonstration of it here:

Plenary round up

Catching up on the technical plenaries from yesterday and today: yesterday we had a talk within the area of bioinformatics followed by autonomic computing; today the opening plenary was on fusion, then WLCG - the computing side of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Modesto Orozco started off yesterday by pointing out he wasn't a computing person; claiming he could tell the difference between a computer and a toaster - but more subtle distinctions weren't quite so clear. Possibly a bit self-deprecating, given that he showed the impact that computers have had within bioinformatics, and that we can expect them to have in the future. It was interesting to here how the problem domains are tackled, and how most real tasks consists of a number of sub tasks, from simulation, database lookup and refinement procedures - which swap between HTC and HPC segments.

The second talk, on autonomic computing focused on a few techniques the speaker had used, and extolling principles. The one area that I felt was missing was some hint as to how we might go about using these ideas - indeed, that was one of the questions, about tool kits and so on, to which the response was that there aren't any. Overall, it felt a bit flat in the end.

This morning started by talking about the EUFORIA work, simulation of fusion processes, leading to the construction of ITER - an Tokomak style fusion reactor. Similar with the bioinformatics from yesterday, there are several different scales of looking at the same thing; proteins in the bio case, and plasmas for the fusion case. Ideally, we'd use the first principles for everyhting, but that's intractable for real problems, so there is a collection of models at different length and time scales that are applied with some steps to integrate the ensemble into single picture.

Finally, the LHC and CERN. In some respects this was one of the first 'customers' of the Grid, and after such a long run up it's nice to see the benefit of the Grid. Interestingly, the time scale of LHC experiments from collision till avaiable for physics analysis is a matter of hours - and that's sustained at 4 GB/s. As a result of that, the time from first collisions to . One point made was that the Grid was born out of political and social concerns - it would be much simpler to put all the computers in one room - but that's not an option (power, sociological etc). Sustainability is the main point of thinking here - looking at using mainstream tool's, rather than HEP-specials.

All in all, 4 interesting views.

Images from yesterday's gala diner

The ESFRI challange

Having attended the ESFRI session yesterday I found that three challenges for the European E-Infrastructure Forum (EEF) raised by Bob Jones stood out in particular:

- Treating grids, supercomputers and networks as separate infrastructures is not a workable strategy for the future. For ESFRI all three will need to be used effectively in combination with one another. The question is how to achieve this.

- The different user communities within ESFRI have different data requirements. For example the social science and humanities community needs effective data archiving systems, whereas the life sciences community require more dynamic databases which can be constantly updated with new data. Each ESFRI project will use different workflows and engines, but the challenge is to develop an infrastructure which can support all of them.

- Despite the various individual requirements of the projects there are common areas which all the user communities need, such as single sign-on. In order to avoid unnecessary repetition and work the pilot projects to investigate how to meet these common requirements need to be carefully designed in order to be useful and relevant to every user community. Trust within in the ESFRI community between different sectors will be key in facilitating the uptake of the results of these projects.

Demonstration about the Impact of the synthetic seismogram archive for the CMT determination

A demonstration about the Impact of the synthetic seismogram archive for the CMT determination by David Weissenbach & Eric Clévédé from IPGP:

In silico Lab demo at the 5th EGEE User Forum

Daniel Harezlak from CYFRONET was kind enough to let us film his demo of the In Silico Lab. Find out more below: