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This gathering will be a chance for those who use the EGEE-managed infrastructure to present their work to colleagues and learn about developments in middleware and application services. The forum provides an important opportunity to scientific communities exploiting distributed infrastructure technologies, to present their work, discuss technology usage with colleagues, and learn about advances in middleware and application services. The User Forum will also be a pivotal occasion for representatives of National Grid Initiatives, the European Commission and those working to make the next generation of large science research facilities a reality (specifically those outlined on the European Roadmap for Research Infrastructures) to meet, interact and collaborate as the EGEE project ends and the transition to a sustainable European e-Infrastructure model led by EGI.eu, the European Grid Infrastructure is completed. The scientific programme consists of daily plenary sessions featuring distinguished keynote speakers, followed by parallel sessions focusing on e-Infrastructure use within the various user disciplines, and also on specific supporting technologies. Additionally, to mark the special occasion, on the second night of the event participants will enjoy a gala dinner at Uppsala Castle, a 16th century fortification overlooking Uppsala. If you have not already, you still have the chance to register. Visit the event website (egee-uf5.eu-egee.org) for more registration, speaker, sponsor and programme details. [ To top ]
Wednesday, 8 February 2010 marked an important event in the development of the European Grid Infrastructure - the formal establishment of its central organising body: EGI.eu. It is now interviewing and hiring personnel. At the start of May, when it will take over coordination of the infrastructure from EGEE, it will likely have only a skeleton staff in place. Priority will be given to filling positions in the Senior Management Team (so that NGIs and users will have someone as a contact point). The support provided for the needs of the current EGEE NA4 users in the EGI era is being revisited. Several project proposals focusing on user support (including ROSCOE, CUE, TAPAS and SAFE) will not be funded. These projects were planning to cover discipline specific and generic community application porting, training, dissemination to new and existing users and business outreach. Contributions from these NA4 VRCs in at least some of these areas will become ‘best effort’, meaning for some communities (e.g. HEP) specialist training activities in particular will have to drop back. Some of the current EGEE services will be continued and enhanced by EGI.eu through the support of the EGI by the European NGIs and EIROs:Training (training event database, digital library, trainers registry) – UK: National e-Science Centre Applications database (will be expanded to include tools as well as applications, new functionalities will be developed such as statistics, data export) – Greece: Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) / Institute of Accelerating Systems & Applications (IASA) Universal Middleware Distribution software repository (primarily to manage the contributions and release of software from EGI’s external software providers, it will be developed to allow community developers to also deposit releases as well as the metadata about applications that goes into the applications database) - Greece: GRNET VO Support (will bring together tools, services and information to help VOs use the EGI) – Portugal/Spain: Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference (IberGrid) Additionally, EGEE will send all Virtual Research Communities, Virtual Organisations and National Grid Initiatives a questionnaire in March. This questionnaire will clarify the progress in allocating resources to existing VOs – explicitly, which sites VOs expect to use and which VOs sites expect to host. (Image courtesy of h.koppdelaney)
Three Regional Operations Centres have recently jointed EGEE’s distributed computing infrastructure. Welcome aboard! The Canadian Operations centre (Canada, click for a view of this ROC in GridMap) has been operational since December 2009. Its central operations site is at TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for nuclear and particle physics research, located on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. TRIUMF is a Tier-1 site in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. This ROC takes care of 12 sites in Canada and China. It supports primarily Large Hadron Collider and Biomedical Virtual Organisations. Composed of five sites across Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, and using a distributed operations model, the Latin America (LA, click for a view in GridMap) ROC has been operating since October 2009. Also hailing from Latin America, the third new ROC Iniciativa de Grid da America Latina e Caribe (IGALC, click for a view in GridMap) has coordinated two sites since December 2009. Its central operations are managed at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. LA supports LHC VOs and IGALC supports the EELA (E-Infrastructure shared between Europe and Latin America) production VO.
It’s just like learning to ride a bike: it takes a bit of training, but is easy once you get the hang of it. To help new and existing users navigate around the infrastructure the Direct User Support (DUS) group is creating training screencasts. Twelve will be produced in all. Interested in beginning your training?
“We wanted to take some of the Use Cases that we share on our website and turn them in to a video presentation,” says Christos Filippidis of the DUS group. “We think this will help more.” [ To top ]
Want all the latest on the 5th EGEE User Forum in Uppsala? If you want to keep your ‘ear to the ground’ we recommend you keep your eyes on your computer. EGEE’s dissemination team will be covering the preparations, the event and the wrap-up. Through a suite of websites we’ll be collecting and sharing up-to-the-minute news, sights, sounds and the thoughts of participants.
Also, EGEE’s press team will be hosting a session you shouldn’t miss: “Disseminating the Grid: An essential guide,” 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday in the main Auditorium. How do professional and dedicated dissemination teams benefit the user community? Want help telling the story of your own work? Learn what works and what doesn’t. This session collects practical examples and case studies to highlight how to deal with the media, organize events, make an impact on policy makers, get business leaders interested in the grid and bring new user communities on board. We hope to see you there! [ To top ]
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EGEE’s Swedish Swan Song 
After visiting the land of oranges, Garibaldi and Mt. Etna, the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE User Forum next touches down in the land of herring, Vikings and long summer nights. The city of Uppsala, Sweden is host to EGEE’s final major event, both a celebration and a farewell: the 5th User Forum, April 12-15th. 
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