News

	Round Up from Barcelona
	News and views on ESFRI
	Congratulations to the winners!
	Bob’s thoughts on EGEE’09 Barcelona
	Reflecting on EGEE’09
	EGI Updates
	Hot off the presses from Barcelona
	You say e-infrastructure, I say cyber infrastructure
	The past and future of grids in four questions?
	Highlights from collaborating project sessions
	Go North!
	The EGEE Road Show

Round Up from Barcelona

A reminder of the quick passing of time, EGEE’09 came and went in a flash. In late September, 21-25, 631 delegates from 43 countries gathered in Barcelona to contribute (and bid farewell to) the last of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE conferences.

The week was exceptional for its rich scientific and technical presentations: attendees chose from 108 programme sessions and were shown 57 posters and 22 demonstrations. Delegates came from a wider-than-usual selection of the grid-interested community: notably representatives from 11 proposed European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) projects, and from US and EC e-Infrastructure funding offices. It was also exceptional for the meetings of many boards and subgroups – particularly the European Grid Initative (EGI) Council and the meetings of proposed Specialised Support Centres (SSCs). Several delegates mentioned they had never been so busy during a conference week before. What happened during EGEE’09? Read on . . .

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News and views on ESFRI

EGEE’09 represented a seminal milestone in the preparations of EGI-linked projects and their services to user communities, as well as the planned research infrastructures projects known collectively as ‘ESFRI’. These are ambitious, large projects (similar to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in scope) which will require mammoth computing support as they start up over the next five to ten years. Having a generic infrastructure – such as the one that can be coordinated through EGI – will help those projects build their distributed research environment – and avoid wasting time and resources in creating unique infrastructures.

On Tuesday John Wood, the chair of the European Research Area Board, opened the plenary session “Operational Grid Infrastructures after EGEE.” Wood highlighted key issues for European research in the future and shared his thoughts on developing a methodology for linking research infrastructures (i.e. the proposed ESFRI projects) and e-Infrastructures such as GEANT, DEISA/PRACE and EGEE/EGI.

Congratulations to the winners!

As at each EGEE event, conference attendees selected the best poster and demo by vote – in what is essentially the EGEE equivalent to the Oscar’s. In a particularly close competition, EGEE’09 delegates elected “Towards a reference model for the LifeWatch ICT infrastructure” by Vera Hernandez and Axel Poigne, both of the Fraunhofer Institute IAIS, as the best poster. (Download the PDF (2MB).)

The demo competition was particularly interesting this year with all demonstrators invited to submit a short video introducing their demo – you can watch these on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/enablinggrids. David Manset (MAAT GKnowledge) and Giovanni Frisoni (IRCCS Fatebenefratelli) were honoured with the winning demo award for “neuGRID – A grid-brained infrastructure to understand and defeat brain diseases.”

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Bob’s thoughts on EGEE’09 Barcelona

It was a pleasure to be at EGEE’09 – I really felt an upbeat, positive atmosphere permeated the week. Looking towards the next few months I think we all have much more confidence in indeed ‘realising EGI’.

We managed to bring together all key stakeholders in e-Infrastructures, and our discussions were very productive. It was also excellent to see so many ESFRI projects present – promising rich interactions with e-Infrastructures for the future.

Reflecting on EGEE’09:
What was important for your activity?

We asked each EGEE activity manager this question. What did they say?

Cal Loomis, applications activity manager (NA4): “I think that the most important development at EGEE'09 was the planning for the evolution of the scientific clusters into SSCs.

“There were meetings for each of the scientific clusters (both for the scientific program and for the SSC evolution). This culminated with a lively session on the borders between the SSCs and various EGI-related projects. Although productive, this showed that there is lots of work to do to get to a viable situation.”

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EGI Updates

One of the key news items of the week was the selection of an EGI Council chairman. During Thursday’s meeting the council elected Per Öster of CSC, Finland. In this position Öster will drive the agenda of the EGI activity and liaise with the proposal writing team in preparation for submitting the EGI proposal to the European Commission on the 24th of November.

Hot off the presses from Barcelona

To highlight the innovative research accomplished with EGEE’s production grid, the EGEE press office sent out several releases during the week of EGEE’09. Particularly of note, Global grids tackle global science and Clouds predicted in Barcelona (covering the merging grids and clouds) were picked up by several news outlets. Download the full text of all releases.

You say e-infrastructure, I say cyber infrastructure... let’s collaborate: European Commission and National Science Foundation Sessions at EGEE’09

– From Catherine Gater, EGEE dissemination

At EGEE, the project office is a paragon of US-EC collaboration –European and American staff work literally side by side, often with much amusement generated on all sides by the quirks of each other’s cultures (the mysteries of London’s Cockney rhyming slang being the most recent source of interest/confusion). So I was keen to attend Tuesday’s session on EC and US work programmes, which particularly focused on opportunities for closer collaboration.

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The past and future of grids in four questions?

Attendees of EGEE’09 formed a unique crowd. Many delegates had been part of the grid community before there was any sort of grid at all: when it was still a mere twinkle in the eyes of computer scientists. These people have seen this idea grow in to a reality. Did it happen as expected? What shape will the future take?

EGEE’s dissemination team took advantage of this grid “School of Athens” that gathered for the week to ask them four questions:

1. What do you think EGEE's main achievement has been?
2. What were its main challenges?
3. Did grids develop the way you expected?
4. If you had a magic wand, where would grids be in 5-10 years?

Unfortunately, we did not get to speak to everyone we would have liked. Would you like to share your perspective? Please write project-eu-egee-dissemination@cern.ch.

Highlights from collaborating project sessions

From Federico Ruggieri, Session Regional Extensions of Grid Infrastructures
This session showed the great interest existing players have in stepping forward in terms of coordination through the CHAIN project. A largely agreed topic was the need to better understand and investigate the concept of 'virtual research communities' and the role they should have in the present and future infrastructure projects.

Go North!

Come April we’ll be heading north to Uppsala for the final User Forum which will be held in collaboration with EGI and the Nordic DataGrid Facility in Uppsala, Sweden, 12-16 April 2010.

With the establishment of sustainable European and National e-Infrastructures this event will be the ideal place for European e-Infrastructure users to meet, share experiences, and shape the future of European e-Infrastructures. More updates in the coming months, see you there!

The EGEE Road Show

– From Neasan O’Neill, EGEE’s Press and Events Manager

The annual EGEE conference always marks the beginning of the busy conference season for the project.

Next up e-Challenges in Istanbul. EGEE will share a booth with EGI and GridTalk at the meeting to give the grid infrastructure and its success stories a greater visibility. Now in it's 19th year the conference is supported by the European Commission and attracts people from research, industry and government to discuss and disseminate knowledge and best practice related to ICT. The aim for this year's meeting is to improve technology transfer from the European Research Area to industry.