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Late on Wednesday, April 15th a volcano in Iceland (known by the festival of letters “Eyjafjallajökull”) had unexpectedly erupted. It spewed plumes of volcanic ash into the upper atmosphere – at just about the elevation planes fly. The British airspace was the first to shut, with the rest of Northern Europe quickly following suit. It is rare – and welcome – for a natural disaster to have so little impact on human lives and suffering. What misery there was being mostly limited to interrupted travel plans and inventive, lengthy journeys home. What journeys we had though! Many of us spent a large part of the weekend following the forum sending flurries of e-mails to each other, trying to access websites that were forever crashing, making phone calls to lines that would not pick up, trying to get news of our workmates, and assuring ourselves that everything would clear up in a day or two. For a group of us in the EGEE project office going home meant more than a full day of playing musical chairs between buses, ferries, trains and taxis. That is, when we were lucky enough to have a chair. In total our journey came in at just under 27 hours. We know we were some of the fortunate ones though. What was your travel story like? We want to hear. Tell us and the account judged the best by the EGEE Project Office will be awarded a prize in honor of your odyssey. E-mail us or post a comment on GridCast.org (See my version of our adventures below in the final story of this final newsletter of EGEE.) [ To top ]
Welcomed by blue skies, pickled herring, and tall friendly people, the EGEE User Forum drew in to its final port of call in Uppsala. Two teams went home with prizes for excellent demonstrations. The winner of Demo Session 1 went to “neuGRID: a grid brained Infrastructure to understand and defeat Brain diseases,” awarded to David Manset of maatG and Yannick Legre of HealthGrid. Marcin Plociennik of PSNC and Milan Prica of Sincrotrone Trieste took home the prize for Demo Session 2 for “Applications using Remote Instrumentation in Grid environment DORII project.” The favourite poster selected by delegates was “Programming gLite without an UI” by Maximilian Berger of University of Innbruck and Thomas Zangerl of KTH. Our congratulations to the winners. The GridTalk and the EGEE dissemination team was on hand, as usual, videoing demonstrations, taking pictures, conducting interviews, and available through the GridCast blog. If you missed the conference, catch the blog! As outlined by Bob Jones, EGEE project director, in his opening words on the first day, the event had a few principal objectives:
He welcomed the ESFRI projects that were present and introduced the European E-Infrastructure Forum. The EEF is currently made up of EGEE & EGI, DEISA & PRACE and Terena & GEANT. Their goal is to weave the e-Infrastructures in the European Research Area together seamlessly. This collaboration will make life easier for users who use different types of infrastructures (networks, HPC and grids). Learn more at http://www.einfrastructure-forum.eu/.
Many of us celebrated this transition together at the 5th EGEE User Forum in Uppsala this month. We made important strides towards our goal of giving EGI the best possible start.
However behind the scenes, Newhouse construction gets underway!
The European Middleware Initiative’s goal is to pull together the best middleware experts in Europe. Working together they will improve and standardise the dominant existing services to produce simplified and interoperable middleware. Specifically, the experts it will work with come from ARC (a product of NorduGrid), gLite (EGEE’s product), Unicore and dCache. EMI will be the major software provider for EGI, empowering the EGI infrastructure with more stable, useable and manageable software. “The innovation in EMI is that for the first time the major middleware producers in Europe are working together in the same project to produce the actual middleware used by the major infrastructures, like EGI and PRACE,” says Alberto Di Meglio, EMI project director. Most of the people involved come from the established community, so EMI preserves the expertise created by previous projects. EMI will also care for the support and maintenance of the existing middleware, but with the precise objective of improving it over the three years of the project so that it becomes something that the scientific research communities can depend on in their day-to-day work. “The middleware as it is today is complex and it has some usability issues,” says Di Meglio. “The goal of EMI is to make middleware easy to use. After three years of the project, the EMI software will hopefully become part of standard operating system distributions – part of a set of standards homogenous across Europe and the world.” EMI launches May 2010, with funding for three years. Click here to learn more. [ To top ]
The fusion community has a new tool to make its work a little more simple and more accurate. “When we run simulations of fusion reactors we have different codes to describe different fields and these codes are run on different architectures,” says Paco Castejon of CIEMAT. One code may be best suited for high performance computing, another might be best for grid. However, the output of one code often is part of the input for another. Since the problems are connected the solutions should be as well. “We’d like to run these codes on the same architecture. Their results would be better blended, giving us better answers and making the work simpler.” This information was presented at the 5th EGEE User Forum in Uppsala, Sweden. Click here to see a demo of the workflow. [ To top ]
The latest incarnation of Argus – the protective and watchful Greek mythological giant with 100 eyes – is as an observer and protector of Europe’s grid infrastructure. A new authorization is in place in EGEE/EGI. A partnership between four institutions (HIP, Finland; INFN, Bologna, Italy; NIKHEF, Netherlands and SWITCH, Switzerland; ) has developed a new authorization service from scratch. It is more secure and more efficient, offering a single authorization point for many services. The initial use-cases are authorizing pilot jobs on the Worker Nodes and implementing a grid-wide global banning list with more to come. This is now available for installation at grid sites (learn more through the Argus wiki). The service will continue to be developed through the European Middleware Initative. “Now, crucially, we would like feedback from sites” says Christoph Witzig of SWITCH. “Once we know what they like about it – and importantly what they don’t like – we can incorporate that feedback in to the next version we issue.” A full article concerning this new service will be appearing in International Science Grid this Week.[ To top ]
The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard was created to aid in the distribution, integration and viewing of medical images in Hospital Systems. DICOM-SR was included into the DICOM standard in 1999, and proposes a standard way to code and structure radiology reports. Newly released software from EGEE includes a suite of components to enable the storage and content-based management of medical data with AMGA. The tree-like structure of DICOM-Structured Reports can be mapped onto the AMGA system, using the template creation, uploading and downloading components, which can be downloaded from this link. [ To top ]
The company recently approached EGEE/EGI to offer free licenses for their software and deploy it in grid sites for EGEE/EGI’s user communities. The UK & Ireland Federation team already has experience with the deployment and provision of the software in grid sites and currently is working with the Application Porting Support team providing site installation instructions and helping other sites in EGEE/EGI to offer the software. To learn about the benefits, features and use of Lumerical, visit the HellasGrid wiki. [ To top ]
The information can be exported using CSV, XML, JSON, KML or even by copying it to the clipboard, making it simple to import data into other applications. An easy-to-use LDAP browser is also integrated, which can help you to navigate the information system.Whether you are a user, a developer, a site administrator or a infrastructure manager, GStat can help you find out what is happening in your Grid. GStat 2.0 was released April 2010. It is developed in collaboration between Academia Sinica and the Grid Technology Group at CERN. A production instance is available at http://gstat-prod.cern.ch, so why not try it out? For more information or to provide feedback, just email project-grid-info-support@cern.ch. - David Horat Flotats [ To top ]
Only when, on Saturday, it seemed things were not getting any better did I begin to think, “This could potentially not be good.” Fortunately I wasn’t in Stockholm alone. When it became clear that we’d have to go back by land, a group of us from the Project Office spent a large part of the weekend formulating plans, wading through rumours, pressing ‘refresh’ on websites that were forever crashing, making phone calls to lines flooded under with calls and trying to get hold of our colleagues, family and friends. After we had considered 1) renting a car, 2) hiring a coach, 3) hitchhiking [kidding], 4) waiting it out or 5) surrendering to fate and starting a new life Stockholm (well, me anyway) –we finally settled on a plan of some daring. After an epic queue at the train station on Sunday (no tickets for sale until Tuesday, and then only out of Sweden) one section of the team braved the line for coaches – seeking overnight passage to Copenhagen. Another contingent from their hotel rooms had found a means to book train tickets on an obscure section of a website and began booking the legs Copenhagen to Hamburg to Basel to Lausanne to Geneva. Assuming we could get to Denmark, it would work. We needed four tickets for that evening. By a kind of miracle we got the very last four. We called Bob Jones (who was poised to get the train tickets, assuming we could get the bus tickets) with the good news. No dice – it seemed. We wouldn’t be able to leave Copenhagen till Tuesday. We’d might was well take a car. We gave the bus tickets back – hoping someone else could use them. A quarter of an hour later Bob called again – he could get the tickets. I rushed back to the coach counter. The woman I’d handed the tickets back to had thrown them away, since they couldn’t be resold. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to find them again and began to shake from fear and stress (this was a real low point of the journey for me). Happily, they were still in a dust bin in the back office. With bus and train tickets (first class, no others were available) we set off from Stockholm at 10:45 p.m. at night. I had hoped that my days of long-distance bus travel had departed along with their heyday: my early 20s. But here we were again . . . in for a eight hour ride (my record, aged 22, is 27 hours from Barcelona to London). As an added pleasantry, the bathroom in our coach was broken. Specifically, the toilet was overflowing. Spewing Eyjafjallajökull-like out of the door and in to the central isle. Sheets of water slid forward whenever the bus downshifted or came to a stop. Heaven help us if we had been in flip-flops. None of us slept well during the night. Catherine Gater, EGEE dissemination manager, shared a row with a woman who crashed, coma-like, for the first half of the journey (literally climbing over her left her undisturbed). At about 3 a.m. the woman turned particularly (one hates to use the word obnoxiously) chatty. “You know, I was eight months pregnant before I suspected something was up.” “I can’t wait to get home to my guinea pig and my fiancé.” “How old are you? That’s a nice iPod.” Upon which Catherine said, “Yes, isn’t it?” and stowed the iPod in the bottommost reaches of her purse and tucked the bag away. Upon arriving in Copenhagen we felt like we’d been spewed from a volcano ourselves, though it would still be a long while before we reached something like land. We had first class passage on the train to Hamburg, the only available, but had to stand, perch on ledges or sit on the floor anyway – the train was woefully oversold. In Hamburg we had about 5 minutes to change platforms (most of the train seemed to be trying to make the same connection) but got on it somehow. From there the day turns foggy for me. We changed trains about half a dozen more times. Sometimes making the slim connecting time, sometimes not. At about dinner time, cruising through Southern Germany, we found an empty table in the dining car. More specifically we, er, I coerced a lingering couple to give it up. To celebrate having made it thus far we ordered some champagne, saying how glad we were that we did not have to make the journey alone, with infants, medical conditions or with the continued company of the bizarre woman on the bus. Following that we made some more train connections, missed some more, got separated in Basel (who knew there were two Basel stations?), had to take a taxi to catch a train from a different station (the driver kindly offered to take us all the way to Geneva for a mere 1,000 CHF. We politely declined. Even if he knocked off 10%? We politely declined again.) In the end, we got home at about 1 a.m. I collapsed in to bed near delirium and spent the next 10 hours unconscious. I woke up knowing where I was (what delight) and knowing that I hadn’t, and did not have to, budge (more delight). Driving my scooter in to work later in the day felt like the best ride of my life: at last, transport I could control, that would not leave without me, which featured plenty of sitting room (for one). I hope your return was also a relief. Please send us an account of your adventures. Please also keep yourself well and continue your good work in the next era. It has been a pleasure to be here with you. -Danielle Venton [ To top ]
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EGEE Versus the Volcano: 
As noted by Steven Newhouse in the closing session of the EGEE technical forum (April 12-16, Uppsala, Sweden), “We are ending with a bang.” 
The EGI council officially elected Steven Newhouse to be the EGI director. Though other EGI appointments will be made over the next two months, its daily operations are assured. The operational tools and support contacts employed daily by users will continue to run as normal. As seen by users, all should remain the same. 
Who will look after distributed computing middleware in the EGI-era? A new project is poised to become the best thing to have ever happened to European middleware. 
The AMGA metadata service organizes the information of the grid. AMGA lets directories be joined to give access to many branches of data through a single point. Through recent work done in the EGEE Life Science community, AMGA can also now be used to help organize standardized medical images. 
Visualise your grid with the GStat web portal. Whether you are interested in a specific site, a whole region or an individual VO, different views are available that show the related information from the grid information system. 
Like most of us, my travel plans have never come across volcanoes before. When I heard about the explosion on Thursday I blithely decided not to worry about it. I wasn’t flying out till Sunday and surely, surely, everything would be clear by then. 
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