The end of November 2004 saw a series of Grid meetings and conferences organized in The Hague in the context of the Dutch European Union presidency. The main event was the second conference of the Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) project on 22-26 November, which had more than 400 participants. This made it the biggest Grid conference in Europe ever, topped only by the Global Grid Forum. This was pointed out by Patrick Aerts, director of the National Computer Facilities Foundation (NCF), the Dutch organization responsible for scientific supercomputing in the Netherlands, and chair of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group.
The two-week sequence of Grid-related events also included meetings of other European Grid research projects, such as SEE-GRID (South Eastern European Grid-enabled e-Infrastructure Development), DILIGENT (Digital Library Infrastucture on Grid-Enabled Technology) and DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications), as well as part of the annual conference of the Sixth Framework Programme of Information Society Technologies (IST2004, 15-17 November), where several Grid-related talks and dissemination activities about Grids and e-science were presented and workshops held.
While the first EGEE project conference in Cork in April 2004 was mainly about planning, the November conference was about reality. It highlighted the state of the deployment of applications and development of the re-engineered Grid middleware, showing that the Grid production service is now in full swing, servicing several applications over a large set of resources.
The first eight months of the project have seen the growth of the initial EGEE Grid production service, in close collaboration with the LHC Computing Grid project (LCG), to 90 sites, providing more than 8000 CPUs of computing power and a storage capacity of more than 4 petabytes. To ensure that the EGEE infrastructure can continue to grow to the target of 20,000 CPUs set for the beginning of 2006, Regional Operations Centres provide a decentralized but efficiently coordinated support structure with front-line user and deployment support. These are supplemented by four Core Infrastructure Centres running essential core Grid services while the operational activity is coordinated by the Operations Management Centre at CERN.
Security procedures are agreed upon and being implemented, and the release of the robust "gLite" Grid middleware developed by EGEE is planned for spring 2005. This has been engineered to make sure that it will serve the highly demanding needs of high-energy physics, while remaining versatile enough to serve other sciences.
While the use of Grid technology is well established in high-energy physics, EGEE is actively seeking new applications and has set up the GILDA testbed (Grid INFN Laboratory for Dissemination Activities), a virtual laboratory that demonstrates the Grid's capabilities. The importance and success of GILDA were emphasized by several speakers, and delegates were given the opportunity to view live demonstrations of applications that have already been ported to the Grid (both on the EGEE Grid production service and on GILDA): these related to medicine, earth science, computational chemistry, astro-particle physics, high-energy physics and video-on-demand.
Requests from several new scientific groups to use the EGEE infrastructure were also considered during the conference. In a session of the EGEE Generic Applications Advisory Panel (EGAAP), seven projects were presented, and the panel approved applications in drug discovery, cosmology and digital libraries to use the services that are offered by EGEE.
The final plenary session provided summaries from the parallel sessions dedicated to cross-activity subjects as well as a talk on the status of Grid standardization work and feedback from the project's External Advisory Committee. An overview of the LCG project provided high-level input from the high-energy physics pilot application area, and a summary of industrial interest in Grids hinted that the Grid might soon extend into non-scientific areas.
During the EGEE conference, members of the DEISA project, a consortium of national supercomputing centres, met and held joint meetings with other projects. DILIGENT and SEE-GRID also held working meetings and SEE-GRID organized a policy workshop to discuss a roadmap for establishing national Grid initiatives.
In the framework of the "European Leadership in Grids and e-Science", a workshop and meeting of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) was also held on 18-19 November. This brought together Grid experts and representatives from European governments to discuss common policies and provide recommendations on the shared use of electronic resources in Europe. Topics discussed included security, accounting, usage policies, user support, and general-purpose versus disciplinary Grids.
The Hague also saw the first joint meeting of the various Grid infrastructure projects in a "Grid Summit" to stimulate co-operation and knowledge exchange. This was followed by an effective and productive "concertation" meeting on e-Infrastructures. Its main objective is the creation of a political, technological and administrative framework for the easy and cost-effective shared use of distributed electronic resources across Europe. An impressive suite of European Grid projects was presented, both providing (EGEE, Géant2, DEISA, SEE-GRID) and benefiting from e-Infrastructures (DILIGENT, SIMDAT, GRIDCC, CoreGRID, GridLab). Grid research concertation efforts (GRIDSTART, NextGRID) were presented, as well as Grid mobility (Akogrimo).
The topic of synergies between Grid research and infrastructure projects generated much enthusiasm at the meeting and many of the participants expressed their interest in joining working groups to take the concertation effort between research and infrastructure further forward.
Early feedback from the participants showed that they appreciated the general good atmosphere and the many possibilities for social networking. In his closing remarks, CERN's Fabrizio Gagliardi, project director of EGEE, expressed his satisfaction with the achievements to date and emphasized the importance of face-to-face meetings for the project: "During this week we have consolidated our plans for the changes coming up. But the conference was also important for building a strong team spirit, which is a challenge in itself for such a large, international project."
Further information
www.e-irg.org
http://public.eu-egee.org/conferences/2nd
Author:
Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel.