The EDGeS project is organizing its Third Training Workshop on "Extending EGEE Virtual Organisations with Desktop Grids and porting applications to this  extended infrastructure" on Sunday 20 September 2009, just before the start of the EGEE'09 Conference in Barcelona, Spain. The workshop is aimed of EGEE user communities who want to extend their Virtual Organisations with inexpensive Desktop Grid resources and port existing EGEE applications to the extended infrastructure. The tutorial is also useful to persons using or operating other Grids.

A Grid is  a powerful number crunching machine bringing the power of thousands of processors to the application developer's finger tips. Although current EGEE Virtual Organisation infrastructures offer a significant amount of resources to run computation and data intensive applications, some scenarios still overgrow the capabilities of existing EGEE VOs. Desktop Grids on the other hand can provide even more computing power by harnessing the power of thousands, ten thousands or even more Desktop computers. Desktop Grids run typically on middleware such as BOINC or XtremWeb, which is different from gLite used by EGEE and many other Service Grids.

Until recently these two types of Grids were not interoperable. But the  European EDGeS project is currently developing a bi-directional bridge connecting all these types of Grids.

There is a strong collaboration between EGEE and EDGeS in order to extend the EGEE infrastructure with volunteer and institutional Desktop Grids  and to support EGEE users to migrate their applications to the integrated EGEE-Desktop Grid (EDGeS) infrastructure. The goal of this tutorial is to train the EGEE user community how to extend their VOs with Desktop Grids, how such an integrated infrastructure works, and how to port and run their applications on this infrastructure. By extending EGEE VOs (Virtual Organisations) with Desktop Grid systems EGEE users can transparently exploit the spare cycles of the interconnected Desktop Grid systems.

The tutorial will have two main parts.

Part 1 will explain the characteristics of Desktop Grid systems and their interconnection possibilities with EGEE VOs. Special emphasis will be given to the different characteristics of the security mechanisms applied in EGEE and in Desktop Grid systems and how they can be harmonized. This part gives practical case studies on how to connect EGEE VOs with either local Desktop Grids such as a campus Desktop Grid or with public Desktop Grids. This part also describes the operational characteristics of the already existing EDGeS infrastructure that connects an EGEE Virtual Organisation and several Desktop Grid systems.

Part 2 will show the methodology and tools by which existing EGEE applications can be ported to the integrated infrastructure. Programming an application for a Grid is not easy. Current Grid application development efforts very often use ad-hoc approaches only when porting the applications. If developers do not follow any suggested methodology this may result in poorly documented systems that do not fulfill user expectations.

The EDGeS Application Development Methodology (EADM) has been specified to support application developers and provide guidelines when porting an application. This part of the tutorial will introduce the EDGeS Grid platform (EGEE extended with BOINC and XtremWeb Desktop Grids) and the EDGeS Application Development Methodology.

About twenty applications from fields  such as bio-science, chemistry, physics, engineering, e-market, have been  already ported to EDGeS. Case studies of tools that make the application development easier and examples for applications that have been ported to EDGeS using the EADM will be presented.

In both parts live demonstrations will be provided in order to help the audience to try the technology and the existing EDGeS infrastructure.

This EDGeS workshop will take place at the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Barcelona. Registration costs 50 euro, with coffee breaks included. More information is available on http://edges-grid.eu/web/userforum/3rdtraining or http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=65595 .