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The 4th EGEE User Forum organized in 2-6 March in Catania, Italy will once again be one of the most significant events of the year. Moreover this year EGEE again joins forces with Open Grid Forum and OGF-Europe, to deliver a combined EGEE UF4/OGF25 and OGF-Europe’s Second International event. There couldn’t be a better time for this collaboration. European grid infrastructures are reaching a turning point, starting their transition to an Natinoal Grid Initiative-based sustainable model. User communities are closely following these developments, having an immediate interest in contributing to the successful outcome of this process. Additionally, new technologies like cloud computing, virtualization and software as a service are emerging either to complement or extend the grid. In this environment standards become more relevant, impacting not only computer scientists and grid architects, but also end-users. The UF4/OGF25 combined event is giving us the opportunity to organize a significant number of joint sessions aiming to bring together standards people with grid user communities in order to strengthen their relationships and bridge the world of standards with the world of grid applications. See you there! —Vangelis Floros, Programme Committee Chair
Thanks to the Grid Observatory, people in the semi-esoteric field of studying the behaviour of large, distributed systems have been given a gift: a trove of data. Like astronomers who peer through a telescope to explore the Solar System, complex system behaviourists are able to examine the Grid Observatory’s data repository to find new patterns in the global behaviour of the grid. The Grid Observatory, a new component of EGEE’s applications group, opened its doors—via a Web portal—last autumn. Through the portal, researchers can access anonymous grid traces, collected and stored through the Grid Observatory application, and information about those traces, for an overall picture of the grid.
Collaborations like WIDSOM and Health-e-Child now have a better way of finding and accessing their data, keeping track of the status of their calculations and recording their results. This is thanks to a new version of the AMGA (ARDA Metadata Catalogue Project) metadata catalogue. The advancements in this 1.9 release are largely the result of the work of a small team at Korea’s Institute of Science and Technology Information. KISTI, also home to a Tier-2 ALICE site in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, has been a member of EGEE since 2006. “This project has truly been driven by the enthusiasm of the participants,” says Birger Koblitz, AMGA-tzar at CERN. The team at KISTI has worked closely with the biomedical community, via WISDOM, for several years. In early 2008 they approached AMGA overseers at CERN with ideas for improvements in the catalogue. These advancements, made possible through a collaboration between KISTI, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy (INFN) and CERN, in Switzerland, increased the performance of AMGA, so that the database can service more queries at one time, implemented the standard query language (SQL), a computer language for databases, and implemented a new data access and integration service (known as WS-DAR), using standards defined by the Open Grid Forum, so that AMGA can now be used through a Web portal. In addition to WISDOM and Health-e-Child AMGA is also used by Digital Libraries and UNOSAT.
Health-e-Child, EGEE supported project connecting paediatrics healthcare professionals with grid technology, was awarded the ICT 2008 Exhibit Grand Prize worth €10,000, at the largest European conference of the year on Information and Communication Technologies held in Lyon, France, 25-27 November 2008.
“We are always looking for ways to link user communities, applications and resource providers,” says Bob Jones, EGEE project director. As a step towards smoothing the way for collaboration between EGEE and commercial resources, the WISDOM collaboration ran a test run early last summer, using gLite middleware on Digital Ribbon resources. Digital Ribbon is a company in the United States, which seeks to be a kind of clearing house for computational resources. They call their model a “service registry,” connecting resource consumers with the right resource providers. It could transform the way users run jobs on clouds or grids. “This successful test with WISDOM shows that applications within EGEE can run well on Digital Ribbon resources,” says Jones. “Now we can see if other user communities might benefit.” Data used for the test consisted of 750 chemical dockings—potential candidates for diabetes drugs. In about 12 hours they ran calculations corresponding to 55 days on a single processing unit. “While this was small for us in comparison to previous sets of calculations,” says Jean Salzemann, computing researcher with the WISDOM collaboration, “it tested new ways of sending jobs. When we are preparing future data challenges, we could consider splitting the data load between EGEE and Digital Ribbon resources.” The WISDOM team uses grid-powered software to screen for potential drug-leads, searching for small molecules called ligands that can bind to and disable disease-promoting proteins. The image above shows a simulated docked compound (green) that inhibits alpha amylase (an enzyme) as a means of treating diabetes. Go back to top
The hunting grounds for new physics come in many landscapes: colliders, cosmic rays or the outer reaches of space to name a few. Researchers at CERN and ETH Zurich perform extensive computer simulations to address questions in the theory of elementary particles where an analytic approach is not available. They are now able to use EGEE-created grid tools for intensive Monte Carlo lattice QCD (quantum chromodynamics) calculations. “A team of QCD researchers at CERN and ETHZ are investigating the properties of the nuclei and the interactions of their elementary components which may form a quark-gluon plasma at high temperature or density,” says Jakub Moscicki, who works with Ganga and DIANE. “The nature of these computations requires extraordinary amounts of CPU power and the grid might be a solution.” This summer a large scale lattice QCD simulation ran on EGEE grid resources, equivalent to approximately 300 CPU years completed within three months. The project was implemented using Ganga as the grid job submission interface and DIANE as the job scheduler following the Master-Worker model. The additional CPU power enabled the researchers to vastly improve the statistical certainty of their results. The scientific results were published in the paper “The chiral critical point of Nf=3 QCD at finite density to the order (
Under the umbrella of the Open Grid Forum Standards Council, a new working group—the Production Grid Infrastructure Working Group (PGI-WG)—was formed in late December. This new working group has emerged from the ongoing work that has been taking place in the Grid Interoperation Now Community Group (GIN-CG) between the major production grid infrastructures. These groups are complementary: the GIN-CG looks at short term steps that are needed to enable real e-science applications that need resources in more than one production infrastructure, demonstrating the technical feasibility of interoperability using open standards wherever possible; the newly formed PGI-WG will work to embed this experience in refined or new OGF specifications. The PGI-WG group will define the requirements for secure job and data management service interfaces across multiple infrastructures based on the experiences gained from GIN-CG. The Web service interfaces and schemas defined by this working group will be a set of profiles based around open standards and specifications such as OGSA-Basic Execution Services, Job Submission Description Language, GridFTP, Storage Resource Manager, and the work of the GLUE2 working group. For three middleware groups behind production grid activity in Europe to come together in an open process represents an important milestone. It allows other grids around the world to join the standardisation activity and to contribute their experiences, and for other software providers that intend to implement these specifications to get involved. It is also a significant step in the grid community’s transition to the model proposed within the European Grid Infrastructure where e-infrastructure built from different software will have to operate seamlessly together. The PGI-WG will create standards that will be used to drive the selection of components into the Universal Middleware Distribution, itself a key objective in the creation of EGI.
The Hydra service was recently added to and deployed on gLite. Hydra is an encrypted file storage solution. It encrypts files and stores them on storage elements already available in the gLite middleware stack. The name “Hydra” stems from the fact that the encryption key is being split and distributed on several different Hydra servers. Even if one Hydra server gets compromised a malicious person cannot decrypt the files. Encrypted data storage is a requirement for many life science applications. —Andreas Unterkircher Go back to top
Healthgrid has prepared an image gallery for EGEE. This gallery holds a repository of copyright-free images for use by consortium members in presentations and publications. You will find images from the Real Time Monitor, events the project has hosted or attended, images of applications and graphics created for EGEE. All project members are allowed to use and reproduce these photos for the purpose of the EGEE project. When publishing images, please credit EGEE using “Courtesy of Enabling Grids for E-SciencE - www.eu-egee.org (c)2009” unless otherwise stated. Go back to top
On September 26th, on the way home from the EGEE '08 conference, EGEE-member Fabio Farina suffered a serious accident. A branch fell on him, and his spine was badly injured. Unfortunately he will need several months if not years to recover, and chances are very high that he will never recover the full use of his legs. A special account (UBS 0279-HU106832.4 Solidarité Farina Fabio) has been set up for those of you who would like to donate money to help him towards his medical costs. Go back to top |
Use and future of European grids focus of upcoming User Forum 
In the last three years the EGEE User Forum has become one of the most important grid computing events in Europe, providing the opportunity to grid scientists and end-users alike to gather and present their latest work, whether they exploit existing grid services, perform scientific research or expand existing capabilities. 
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