INDUSTRY

The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project will award a prize to the best live demonstration of a Grid application shown at the 2nd EGEE User Forum. Scientists in more than 200 Virtual Organizations from fields as diverse as Biomedicine, Earth Sciences, Nuclear Fusion and High-Energy Physics are now using the distributed computing infrastructure of EGEE, which shows the wide adoption and versatility of this new technology. The EGEE project organizes its annual User Forum events to provide a platform for the Grid user community to meet experts and exchange experiences, but also to showcase successful use cases of Grid adoption. At the event in Manchester, 20 teams of researchers are demonstrating how they are currently using the EGEE Grid in their research. “The demonstrations here at the User Forum show clearly how Grid technology is now routinely used, providing real benefits to the scientific community,” said Charles Loomis, Manager of the Application Support activity in EGEE. “And the significance of the Grid goes beyond the possibility to share computing resources and services on a global scale. More and more the grid is a place where new scientific collaborations are born as it establishes new contacts between individual researchers.” The live demonstrations shown at the Grid User Forum gave a flavor of the ever growing number of application domains and individual research groups using the processing and data storage capabilities offered by the EGEE Grid. With more than 200 sites in 45 countries and up to 100 000 jobs completed every day, the EGEE project operates the world’s largest production-quality scientific Grid infrastructure, available 24 hours a day to the scientific community. Applications are the life-blood of the EGEE project; demonstrating the broad adoption of the infrastructure as a mission-critical computing platform. Dedicated teams within the project support the integration of new scientific communities and their applications, with a lightweight registration procedure that minimizes start-up obstacles and provides important contact channels. The sessions at the User Forum cover the different application domains using the Grid, ranging from Astronomy, Biology, and Earth Science, to Physics, as well as specific technical issues that affect users across domains, such as data management, monitoring and user interfaces. As the Grid community increasingly includes business partners, both as users and service provider, presenters are coming from industry as well as academia to show best practices, introduce new developments and raise issues that still need to be tackled. EGEE-II is a project co-funded by the European Commission - contract number INFSO-RI-031688 The best demo prize is sponsored by Apple Inc. and will be given to the winners tomorrow during the EGEE User Forum plenary session. “The Grid is an important new tool for the scientific community and used by an increasingly diverse community”, said Massimo Marino, Apple Research & Technology Support Project Leader. “Apple offers innovative integrated digital solutions and looks with interest at these new developments.” This year the EGEE User Forum is jointly organized with the OGF20 meeting, to bring together users with Grid standards groups, and is hosted by the National e-Science Centre, the University of Manchester and the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS). Further information can be found on its Web site .