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Conference Blog highlights GridCast interview: Bob Jones, project director of EGEE, shares his thoughts on the conference. Catherine Gater, dissemination manager for EGEE, Friday post: Farewell to Istanbul “It’s the end of this year’s conference – the final slide has been shown, the last coffee drunk and the concluding session wrapped up . . .” From EGEE’s business outreach specialist Sy Holsinger: Head in or out of the clouds? “The first day of the EGEE’08 Business Track delved into the latest hype of cloud computing. Discussions have started on what it is, who is it for and should everyone really have their head in the clouds? . . .” Demo & poster winners from EGEE’08 Best poster: NEUROLOG: neuroscience application workflows execution on the EGEE grid; Javier Rojas Balderrama et al. Best application demo: G-RISICO: A Wild Fire Risk Assessment application running on an advanced Grid infrastructure; Marco Verlato, Paolo Mazetti, Valerio Angelini, Paolo Fiorucci Best infrastructure demo: EGEE Application Porting Support Group; Gergely Sipos Go back to top
At September’s EGEE conference in Istanbul, the audience received a piece of sound advice during the welcome address from the European Commission, eScience grids: Where does Europe stand?, delivered by Mário Campolargo: “We must not be afraid of the future.” Within the European Grid Initiative, planning is underway for the implementation of a sustainable, pan-European grid infrastructure to support collaborative eScience . . . Read full article in International Science Grid this Week Go back to top
Four thousand kilometers away from their colleagues at CERN, in another hemisphere and time zone, researchers at the Dakar Computing Center, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, in Senegal are now able to contribute to Large Hadron Collider experiments from their home institution. In a joint project with UNESCO, Hewlett-Packard and France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), UCAD is the first Sub-Saharan African component in EGEE’s infrastructure. “Having a Grid node will be a great boost to the scientific and academic activity in the area,” says Guy Wormser, LAL Orsay CNRS. “There is always a burgeoning relationship between infrastructure and the science community, when connected by the Grid.” Read the UNESCO press release.
Doctors in Amsterdam may soon have more time in their busy schedules to spend with their patients. A new way to access and manage patient data—the EGEE-developed Medical Data Manager—was installed in June at the Amsterdam Medical Center, Netherlands, in its first deployment for real use. They hope to be finished testing by the end of this year and to use the tool in production in 2009. “This tool is expected to be a great boon for the doctors and researchers at the Amsterdam Medical Center, " said Johan Montagnat, computing researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). “They can now access data quickly—avoiding the lengthy and tedious process of manual anonymization, copying and transferring.” The data catalog they can now access has swelled, they can now compare any relevant data stored within the system. They are also able to access data remotely, useful if they are in the habit of using computers at different sites or using grid resources to perform analysis of their patient data.
Members of EGEE’s Earth Science community are contributing to the fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The mission of the IPCC, a scientific body set up by the World Meteorological Organization and by the United Nations Environment Programme, is to give policy makers objective information about the causes and consequences of climate change. In 2010 the IPCC will need to manage huge amount of metadata for climate models. A related technology for data and metadata handling is the EGEE-supported GRelC. Three institutions, the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change in Lecce (CMCC), Italy, Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in Paris, France and the Fraunhofer-Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing in St.Augustin, Germany, have set up a distributed European testbed running the GRelC Data Access and Integration Service (DAIS). Using GRelC DAIS metadata services, included in the EGEE RESPECT Program, climate scientists will be able to easily query through a web interface the aggregated metadata repository without seeing the underlying complexities and distribution. The metadata portal, provided by CMCC, will be finalized and available in few months. Preliminary tests have been carried out on a subset of the ENSEMBLES project and were presented at the EGEE’08 Conference during the earth science community meeting. - With thanks to Sebastian Denvil, IPSL and Sandro Fiore, CMCC Go back to top
A tiled 3x4 display video wall for geographic information systems and remote sensing visualization has been installed at the Institute of Space Research, Russian Academy of Science. SAGE 3.0, Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment, linux-based software, was used for the visualization.  It is ported by the lab to Microsoft Windows together with two geographic information systems tools, NASA World Wind, a special SAGE plugin by Moscow State University, available at Codeplex and parallel MS Virtual Earth + OpenGIS WMS tile server for .NET (still under development but stable). The geographic information systems viewer can be used for 3D macro maps of large art pieces, such as frescos or icons. Go back to top
Last Friday, October 3rd, grid-enthusiasts gathered virtually around the world for a special event to celebrate the success of the Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid. While physics was the star scientific discipline of the day, attendees also witnessed their importance to a wide-range of applications from a host of disciplines. “The great thing about grids is that they have many uses,” said Bob Jones, project director of EGEE, in his talk “The Grid Beyond Physics.” He discussed applications in seismology, atmospheric research, astronomy, fusion and the life sciences. Onsite demonstrations, held throughout the day, showed attendees some of these applications live. Demos included the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, the ALICE experiment, the ATLAS experiment, the CMS experiment, the LHCb experiment, the Health-e-Child project (pediatrics), the ITER project (fusion energy), Open Science Grid and the WISDOM project (drug discovery). If you were not able to attend in person, check out many of these demos online, posted by the GridTalk project on YouTube.
The Grid Observatory, a new cluster within the applications activity (NA4) in EGEE-III, collects, publishes and analyses data on the behaviour of the EGEE grid. Its aim is to develop a scientific view of the dynamics of grid behaviour and usage. This helps both computer science researchers working in the field of autonomic computing and grid developers seeking to improve reliability, stability and performance. With extensive monitoring facilities already in place, EGEE grid offers an unprecedented opportunity to observe, and gain understanding of, new computing practices of e-Science. Grid Observatory goals
The second goal of the Grid Observatory is to provide a better understanding of the grid and through this, better optimisation.
A mailing list and a wiki has been set up for the internal needs of the GO, including EGEE-III members who have expressed interest in the GO activity without being directly involved. Interaction with the Dashboard activity, and with networking support activity (SA2) has been requested by the TMB, and is scheduled for this autumn. The GO has obtained supplementary funding by the French CNRS under the PEPS programme, which allowed outsourcing the design and maintenance of the portal web site. The region Ile de France-DIGITEO has funded a two-year postdoctoral position focused on analysis. The Grid Observatory portal is at: www.grid-observatory.org. For further information write contact@grid-observatory.org.
The EGEE Pre-Production Service went through a redefinition of its mandate and implementation between June and September, aiming to provide EGEE users with services more responsive to their needs and use cases. The new PPS access model is based on the concept of “pilot” or “experimental” services. A pilot is a highly specialized workspace set-up upon demand of classes of users willing to test a particular new grid feature, customised according to user requirements. The users of a pilot service receive direct support by middleware developers, testers, operations experts and service administrators for the completion of their use cases. As a positive side-effect on the release process, an appropriate use of pilot services can lead to an approximate 30% reduction of the overall time-to-production of a new service or feature. The new model was applied for the first time this summer to test the gLite CREAM CE (Computing Resource Execution and Management Computing Element) and the related submission add-ons gLite Workload Management System. During the first phase of the pilot, closed in September, the Alice virtual organization did intense submission testing in production conditions. As a result they decided to base their default submission model on CREAM and to keep LCG-CEs as fallback solution. A second phase of the pilot started in October. In this phase CMS will try CREAM in production conditions using the gLite WMS-based submission method. Go back to top
The Experiment Integration and Support team at CERN played a key role during the Common Computing Readiness Challenge 2008 exercise, stressing their support role for each Large Hadron Collider experiment. They contributed to testing critical services for each experiment during their individual full dress rehearsals and to the discovery of weak points of the system, points which could lead to instabilities during the real data taking regime (beginning in spring 2009). Read a related article in International Science Grid this Week Go back to top
In June the fifth version of Ganga, a user-friendly frontend for job submission, was released. Ganga allows trivial switching between testing on a local batch system and large-scale processing on Grid resources. Ganga 5 is used for data analysis in high-energy physics by ATLAS and LHCb experiments as well as for theoretical physics calculations such as lattice quantum chromodynamics. In addition Ganga has been established as the gridification tool used by the beam team at CERN for tracking and collimation studies applied to the Large Hadron Collider accelerator. Ganga jobs can be submitted to several resources in addition to the EGEE infrastructure, in particular NorduGrid and Open Science Grid as required by the experiments ATLAS and LHCb. Go back to top
Come 2012 it is likely that IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) public address will be exhausted. To address the expected shortage, the networking support activity of EGEE works on making the project IPv6 (version 6) compliant. The overall networking coordination task began in June to test selected packages for IPv6 compliance in collaboration with EGEE's middleware engineering activity. The three packages currently under test are gridFTP in the Globus Toolkit 4 implementation, the ASIO library of the boost package and the gSOAP web services library. Networking Support activity manager Xavier Jeannin, CNRS, says the results are very encouraging since these are mainly IPv6 compliant. However, Jeannin says, gridFTP has one issue existing in the communication between IPv4 and IPv6 nodes. In order to allow developers to test the interplay between different node of the Grid, the activity has set up a test bed. Nine SLC4.6 gLite nodes are involved: UI, CE, WMS, VOMS, site-BDII, LFC, DPM, WN, LB. Go back to top
The Migrating Desktop Platform is a uniform environment for grid application that enhances gLite with user-friendly access to services covering the whole application lifecycle from job defining, launching, monitoring until visualization of job results. The RESPECT program (Recommended External Software for EGEE CommuniTies) publicizes grid software and services that work well with the EGEE gLite software. Go back to top
Report from OGF-Europe Community Outreach Seminar, June 2008, Barcelona, Spain Dedicated data infrastructures for sharing the deluge of information accumulated by scientific communities will allow us to explore unprecedented multidisciplinary applications, says Luigi Fusco, European Space Agency and co-ordinator of the FP7 project GENESI-DR project. This is especially so when these data infrastructures interoperate with open grid resources. Open Grid Forum-Europe’s first Community Outreach Seminar dedicated to digital repositories in the earth, space, natural resource sciences and the humanities focused on the best practices and technical requirements that will help push interoperability and standardisation. “Virtualisation of repository systems on a storage (shared infrastructure) as well as a content level (shared collection) is clearly a key evolutionary step for all user domains,” says Andreas Aschenbrenner, Göttingen University. “This seminar was important in terms of connecting the activities of the grid with the repository community to move towards a common goal and pave the ground for fruitful future debate and co-operation.” Plans are under way to create a working group on digital repositories within OGF. “This is a hugely important area that is only going to become more important as time goes on”, says David De Roure, Southampton University and OGF e-Science Area Director, who chaired the seminar. “The seminar was valuable because it offered a forum for discussion about a world of multiple repositories, rather than people just thinking about the repositories they use in their own projects - this is the challenging world we are moving into.” For more information about OGF-Europe visit their Web site. Source: OGF-Europe |
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EGEE'08 round up  |
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