Barcelona had its hands full during the third week of September. In addition to hosting the iconic artwork that the city is known for, the annual Mercè festival filled the streets with music, dancing, human-tower building and gigantic dolls. Among the crowds fighting for space on La Ramblas was a unique group. Hundreds of people from all around the world were on hand to celebrate the final conference of Europe's flagship Grid-computing project and to discuss and plan for the future of computing for scientific research.
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE '09 (EGEE'09) gathered 631 people from 43 countries. 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 community: notably representatives from 11 proposed European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) projects, and from US and EC e-Infrastructure funding offices. There were also meetings of many boards and subgroups – particularly the European Grid Initiative (EGI) Council and the meetings of proposed Specialised Support Centres (SSCs).
ESFRI sessions – big plans on the horizon
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 infrastructure projects known collectively as ESFRI. These are ambitious, large projects (similar to the LHC in scope), which will require mammoth computing support as they start up over the next five to 10 years. Having a generic infrastructure – such as the one that can be co-ordinated through EGI – will help these projects to build their distributed research environment and avoid wasting time and resources in creating unique infrastructures.
On the 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.
A number of common organizational and technical needs emerged from the ESFRI presentations. These projects may benefit by using common approaches, in collaboration with Europe's pre-existing e-Infrastructures.
EGEE will be following up on the discussions and contacts made with ESFRI projects. An EU concertation meeting in Brussels in late October allowed these discussions to progress, contacts have been set between members of EGEE (within the Project Management Board) and representatives of the ESFRI projects. The recently formed European E-Infrastructure Forum may be a useful interaction point between ESFRI projects and e-Infrastructures.
Planning for EGI – full steam ahead
During Thursday's meeting the council elected Per Öster of CSC, Finland, as the EGI Council chairman. 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 24 November.
The EGI Council also allocated most of the global operational and infrastructure-focused tasks to National Grid Initiatives. These allocations are now being integrated into the proposal. The remaining global tasks, primarily those related to middleware, are available for all NGIs and EIROs (the EIRO forum is a collaboration of seven European Intergovernmental scientific Research Organisations, responsible for infrastructures and laboratories) to bid for.
And the award goes to…
At each EGEE event, conference attendees vote for the best poster and demo. In a 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. All of the demonstrators were invited to submit a short video introducing their demo. You can watch these on YouTube at 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" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpfD6GZ90tQ).
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. Global grids tackle global science and Clouds predicted in Barcelona (covering the merging grids and clouds) were picked up by several news outlets. You can download the full text from the Press Room section of the EGEE website.
Thoughts from Bob Jones, EGEE project director
"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 'realizing 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.
"Although we were all busy during EGEE'09, now is the time to maintain that level of energy as we continue to hammer out the details of the future infrastructure and its satellite projects. Can we make a success of this next phase? More than ever the answer is a resounding 'Yes we can!'_"
Useful links
EGEE website: www.eu-egee.org
EGEE'09 website: http://egee09.eu-egee.org