ENGINEERING
International computing infrastructures ready to tackle the big scientific issues facing us today
Modern science today relies on vast amounts of computer power. And, most modern science is done by large international teams of researchers. By working together, modern scientists are able to tackle the big issues facing us today, such as pandemics, climate change and renewable energy.
During the last ten years, several significant international e- infrastructures have been built up in Europe to support scientists involved in research that crosses national boundaries. The EGEE series of projects connected computers installed in machine rooms in research organisations – mainly across Europe. The EDGeS project connected another 150.000 Volunteer Desktop PC's to this infrastructure. This year, both these initiatives have started the journey towards a long term, sustainable infrastructure through EGI.
The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), coordinated by EGI.eu - a new organisation established in Amsterdam - connects over 240.000 computer nodes together, mainly in Europe, to support a multi-disciplinary research community and their international collaborators .
This media event is a first opportunity for the press to see this scientific infrastructure "at work":
- The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is now supporting the first permanent grid infrastructure in Europe. EGI’s first international conference is taking place in Amsterdam from 14-17 September (EGI Technical Forum - EGI TF2010).
- The media event will also mark the official launch of the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF). IDGF is a collaboration between a large number of Volunteer Desktop Grids, that allow citizens to donate computing time to science from home.
- The fact that this first event takes place in The Netherlands illustrates the importance of the Dutch contributions in this area. The all-week grid event is kicked-off by the Dutch BiG Grid User Day on Monday 13 September and is supported by the Dutch Gridforum society.
This media event and press tour will offer a behind-the-scenes look at the world of grid and desktop computing, with a unique opportunity to view work at the cutting edge and to speak to the key people involved.
Media-event
A press conference will kick off the event, including short introductions from the key players in the e-Infrastructures landscape:
- Amandus Lundqvist, chairman of the General Board of SURF, will highlight the Dutch plans to integrate the elements of the Dutch e-Infrastructure under the SURF umbrella.
- Enric Mitjana or Kostas Glinos, representatives of the European Commission, will explain the view of the European Commission in supporting e-Infrastructures for science.
- Steven Newhouse, director of EGI (www.egi.eu) will introduce the new pan-European scientific distributed computing e-Infrastructure, which is supported through the EGI-InSPIRE project. The project is co-funded through the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme and supported by contributions from national grid initiatives across Europe.
- Willem Bouten, researcher at the University of Amsterdam, will show the use of a distributed infrastructure in the Flysafe-project, a bird avoidance warning system.
- Alexandre Bonvin, researcher at the University of Utrecht, will demonstrate how current challenges in structural biology and life sciences profit from virtual research platforms that provide the worldwide research community with user-friendly tools, platforms for data analysis and exchange.
- Peter Kacsuk, project director of the EDGI project, will demonstrate scientific applications that people contribute to from their home computers, for instance to help to solve the energy crisis.
- Ad Emmen, director of AlmereGrid, and active in the EDGI and DEGISCO desktop grid projects will highlight how the International Desktop Grid Federation will enable millions of people and thousands of organisations and companies to donate computing time to science.
There will be ample opportunity to ask questions (in English and in Dutch).
Press tour
During the press tour you will be guided along a number of demonstrations that are part of the conference exhibition. Each demo will illustrate, live, a scientific application that runs on the production infrastructures or show an innovative aspect of Europe’s advanced computational and data infrastructure.
Location, date, time: 15 September, 12:30h Beurs van Berlage, Damrak, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
More information: Mieke van den Berg, + 31 6 1091 2431, info@biggrid.nl.
If you want to attend this media event, please send an email to info@biggrid.nl before Monday 13 September, 12.00h.
Abbreviations
DEGISCO: Desktop Grids for International Scientific Collaboration
EDGeS: Enabling Desktop Grids for eScience
EDGI: European Desktop Grid Initiative EGI: European Grid Infrastructure, http://www.egi.eu/about/press/ EGI-TF2010: EGI Technical Forum 2010, http://www.egi.eu/EGITF2010/
IDGF: International Desktop Grid Federation