EGEE'06

Europe/Zurich
CICG

CICG

CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
Description
The first conference of the EGEE-II project, to be held at the International Conference Centre, Geneva, Switzerland.
    • 09:00 10:10
      Opening Plenary Conf. Room 1

      Conf. Room 1

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 09:00
        Dr Robert Aymar, Director General CERN 10m
      • 09:10
        Dr Charles Kleiber, Swiss State Secretary for Science and Research 10m
      • 09:20
        Pierre-François Unger, President of the State Council of the Canton of Geneva 10m
      • 09:30
        Viviane Reding - EU Commissioner for information society and media 10m
        Video message
      • 09:40
        Prof. José Mariano Gago - Portuguese Minister of Science 10m
      • 09:50
        Intel Gold Sponsor Speech 20m
        Speaker: Dr Hans-Christian Hoppe (Intel)
        Slides
    • 10:10 10:40
      Coffee break 30m
    • 10:40 12:30
      Opening Plenary Conf. Room 1

      Conf. Room 1

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 10:40
        Dr. Wolfgang von Rüden - CERN IT Department Head 20m
        Slides
      • 11:00
        Dr. Dan Atkins - Head of NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure in the US 20m
        Slides
      • 11:20
        Dr. Mario Campolargo, Head of Research Infrastructure Unit, European Commission 20m
        Slides
      • 11:40
        Dr. Bob Jones - EGEE-II project director 20m
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Conference logistics 10m
        Slides
    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 14:00 15:30
      Business: Introduction to EGEE & Business Conf. Room 4

      Conf. Room 4

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Introduction to EGEE & EGEE & Business

      An Introductory session on EGEE, offers an overview of the
      EU funded EGEE project; its ultimate goals; where it is now
      and where it plans to be in the coming months.


      Delegates will hear about specific success stories of EGEE
      Grid adoption and its benefits to users. An overview will be
      offered comparing Grid & Research with Grid & Industry with
      interventions made from major Industry players such as:
      Intel & HP. A visionary, policy overview from Mario
      Campolargo, Head of Unit of Research Infrastructures will
      cover the EC strategy on the importance of Grid adoption in
      enterprise for the future.



      Grid Business Models Global vs Corporate
      Grid


      How far do business models need to change for
      companies to use grid effectively? This follow-up session
      from the introduction on benefits to users looks at
      analysing this question in greater detail introducing real
      case studies from industrial experts in adopting Grid.
      Presentations will be given on how enterprise may
      increase its revenue through improved business
      processes. A Panel discussion is organised for the latter
      part of the session.

      Convener: Mr Osborne Ian (unkown)
      • 14:00
        Welcome & Chair Bob Jones - CERN EGEE project director - How EGEE does Business 20m
        This talk will explain how the EGEE project works with business and industry as well as the mechanisms it has defined to allow commercial organisations to get involved. A look to the future beyond the current project will also be included.
        Speaker: Dr Bob Jones (CERN)
        Slides
      • 14:20
        Mario Campolargo, Head of Unit of Research Infrastructures, European Commission - eInfrastructures as icebreakers for Industry 20m
        Abstract: The talk introduces the audience to the European Union (EU) research policies, focusing in the area of Research Infrastructures. It outlines the historic evolution of the constituency of electronic Infrastructures (eInfrastructures) as these become mature. In this process, the progressively increasing role of industry is analysed. The main eInfrastructures topics in the 7th EU Framework Programme (FP7) Connectivity, Grids, Supercomputers and Scientific Repositories are outlined, and the participation of industry in upcoming FP7 calls is encouraged.
        Speaker: Mario CAMPOLARGO
        Slides
      • 14:40
        Hans-Christian Hoppe - Intel - Enabling Grid in Industry and Enterprise 20m
        Grid Computing has come a long way since its inception in the academic area; the dynamic, transparent, and secure access to a variety of computing, data and network resources makes it a very attractive proposition for use in industrial and general Enterprise contexts. The talk discusses how to facilitate the uptake of Grid technology with Enterprises for technical and general business computing. It touches on the role of standards, the need for integration with existing Enterprise IT ecosystems and on how to leverage new platform﷓level technology in future Grid systems.
        Speaker: Dr Hans-Christian Hoppe (Intel)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Martin Walker HP EMEA - Introduction to EGEE and Business 20m
        Similarities and differences between Grid deployments in research and industry are described and assessed. The status of the present situation is described from a global perspective. An attempt will be made to project the potential future evolution of grids in research and industry.
        Speaker: Martin WALKER
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      EGEE/OSG Security Conf. Room 11

      Conf. Room 11

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      (closed meeting)




      This closed meeting is a hands-on work meeting between OSG,
      EGEE and Open Science Center - to discuss and update the
      OSG/EGEE Security Audit Strategy and Plans document
      initiated during the MWSG 9 meeting in June at SLAC.

      Minutes
      pictures
      slides
      slides
      slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      HealthGrid: Presentation of EGEE data management and Healthgrid projects Conf. Room 3

      Conf. Room 3

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      "Heterogeneous Data Integration using EGEE -
      Requirements and Ways Forward".

      After a short introduction, a 20 minute talk will be given
      by an EGEE middleware expert to introduce gLite data
      management services, followed by 10 minutes for
      questions. Then each of the HealthGrid projects present
      will present its requirements for data management and
      what it might wish for from EGEE. Then, the floor would
      be open for a round-table discussion with EGEE data
      management experts. Invited participants would be
      from the FP6 Healthgrid Projects and the NA4, SA1 and
      JRA1 groups in EGEE.

      • 14:00
        Introduction 10m
        The goal of the introduction is to define the goals of the workshop
        Slides
      • 14:10
        EGEE data management services 30m
        This first talk of the workshop aims at introducing the gLite data management services and to open a first discussion
        Speaker: Dr Akos Frohner (CERN)
        Slides
      • 14:40
        Presentation of Biopattern 10m
        The goal of this talk is to shortly present the project and to introduce the project needs in terms of data integration
        Speaker: Prof. Emmanuel Ifeachor (Univ. Plymouth)
      • 14:50
        Presentation of ACGT 10m
        The goal of this talk is to shortly present the project and to introduce the project needs in terms of data integration
        Speaker: Dr Stelios Sfakianakis (FORTH)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Presentation of Health-e-Child 10m
        The goal of this talk is to shortly present the project and to introduce the project needs in terms of data integration
        Speaker: Dr David Manset (GMaat)
        Slides
      • 15:10
        Presentation of @NEURIST 10m
        Speaker: Dr Kai Kumpf (SCAI Fraunhofer)
      • 15:20
        Presentation of SIMDAT 10m
        Speaker: Dr Kai Kumpf (SCAI Fraunhofer)
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Training (NA3) Conf. Room 15

      Conf. Room 15

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This session will review the training events held by
      activity partners so far in EGEE-II and discuss future
      plans and training requirements.

      • 14:00
        INTRODUCTION TO NA3 IN EGEE-II 15m
        This introduction will describe the changes in the NA3 activity in phase 2 of the EGEE project, introduce new partners and highlight changes in the approach to training provision in this phase.
        Slides
      • 14:15
        e-Learning Digital Library and the ETF 15m
        This talk will demonstarte use of the EGEE digital library for accessing and reusing course materials. It will alsso describe the work of the Editorial Task Force (ETF) in reviewing archive course materials and recommending those which are particularly suitable for re-use when running future training events.
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Experiences in Swiss/German Federation 15m
        This contribution will describe experience of running Grid training events in the Swiss/German Federation, focussing particularly on market demand and market readiness.
        Slides
      • 14:45
        Reports from Activity Partners 30m
        This session will include brief reports from activity partners on progrees of EGEE training in their areas.
      • 15:15
        OPEN DISCUSSION 15m
        We will wrap up the session by inviting discussion on themes of interest - including: - Communications between activity partners - Overall Activity Metrics and Partner Metrics - Reporting requirements/Feedback - eLearning digital library and ETF - t-infrastructure provision - Impact of gLite3 changes on training
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee break 30m
    • 16:00 17:30
      Business: Business Models and Security Challenges in Grid Conf. Room 4

      Conf. Room 4

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Introduction to EGEE & EGEE & Business

      An Introductory session on EGEE, offers an overview of the
      EU funded EGEE project; its ultimate goals; where it is now
      and where it plans to be in the coming months.


      Delegates will hear about specific success stories of EGEE
      Grid adoption and its benefits to users. An overview will be
      offered comparing Grid & Research with Grid & Industry with
      interventions made from major Industry players such as:
      Intel & HP. A visionary, policy overview from Mario
      Campolargo, Head of Unit of Research Infrastructures will
      cover the EC strategy on the importance of Grid adoption in
      enterprise for the future.



      Grid Business Models Global vs Corporate
      Grid


      How far do business models need to change for
      companies to use grid effectively? This follow-up session
      from the introduction on benefits to users looks at
      analysing this question in greater detail introducing real
      case studies from industrial experts in adopting Grid.
      Presentations will be given on how enterprise may
      increase its revenue through improved business
      processes. A Panel discussion is organised for the latter
      part of the session.

      • 16:00
        Martin Walker HP EMEA - Grid Business Models: Global vs. Corporate Grids 20m
        Grids in industry must respond to business drivers and exigencies. Grids are part of the global evolution of corporate information technology. This means that corporate grids have to be seen in the context of major IT trends like virtualization, standardization, and the building of service-oriented architectures. The corresponding forces and consequences are described, as well as observed benefits of grid deployments in industry.
        Speaker: Martin WALKER
        Slides
      • 16:20
        Anders Grangard eBus Director GS1 - Supply chain visibility with GS1 20m
        GS1 is a not-for-profit organisation that develops global standards for the unique identification of goods and services with offices in 104 countries around the world. The GS1 system consists of a set of complementary standards and solutions that in combination allows for streamlined supply and demand chain from manufacturer to end users. Physical goods and products are marked with barcodes or RFID tags, business information is exchanged using UN/EDIFACT or XML based messaging standards and Internet based networks are used for master data alignment and supply chain event management. The aim of this presentation is to describe these standards and solutions as they are applied today as well as future development. The focus will be on information sharing and communication. This can then serve as a basis for a discussion on whether Grid technology could be applicable and, if so, what questions need to be resolved, such as security, authentication, investments and migration path.
        Speaker: Anders GRANGARD
        Slides
      • 16:40
        Katarina Stanoevska BeinGrid Project - 20m
        The main objective of the Business Experiments in Grid (BEinGRID) projectis to foster the adoption of the so-called Next Generation Grid technologies by the realization of several business experiments and the creation of a toolset repository of Grid middleware upper layers. BEinGRID will undertake a series of targeted business experiment pilots designed to implement and deploy Grid solutions in a broad spectrum of European business sectors (entertainment, financial, industrial, chemistry, gaming, retail, textile, etc). Eighteen business experiments are planned in the initial stage of the project with a second open call for proposals in the latter stages. Secondly, a toolset repository of Grid service components and best practise will be created to support European businesses that wish to take-up the Grid. To minimise redevelopment of components, BEinGRID will deploy innovative Grid solutions using existing Grid components from across the European Union and beyond.
        Speaker: Ms Katarina Stanoevska (BeinGrid Project)
        Slides
      • 17:00
        Paul Wang Advisory, Senior Manager, PricewaterhouseCoopers - Grid Security: A Business driven SWOT analysis 20m
        Is the Grid providing new issues and challenges on information security? Computational ressource theft is occurring in lots of institutions and is nowadays causing very limited liability issues, but much more obvious performance issues. Grid computational ressource theft, if occuring would cause tremendous liability issues, for the ressource provider and the ressource requester. A high implication on organisational, procedural as well as legal and ethical aspects would be caused. The purpose of this session is to provide a business analytical perspective of the strengths, weaknesses, opportuntities and threats of what could be some of the issues related to Grid security. Indicate how Grid connected institutions would need to deal with these issues. Demonstrate how malicious individuals or organisations could make use of the Grid to deploy massive cyber information attacks. Rather than take the common “head in the sand” approach to world interconnected networks problems, this session presents a proactive business, technical and legal look at protecting Grid assets and Grid ressources against cyberattackers. Putting things in perspective by looking at the threats, delegates will be presented with comprehensive ideas that offer defence before disputes arise, and pragmatic advice on resolution if they do.
        Speaker: Paul WANG
        Slides
    • 16:00 17:30
      EGEE/OSG Security Conf. Room 11

      Conf. Room 11

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      (closed meeting)




      This closed meeting is a hands-on work meeting between OSG,
      EGEE and Open Science Center - to discuss and update the
      OSG/EGEE Security Audit Strategy and Plans document
      initiated during the MWSG 9 meeting in June at SLAC.

      Minutes
      pictures
      slides
      slides
      slides
    • 16:00 17:30
      HealthGrid Conf. Room 3

      Conf. Room 3

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      "Heterogeneous Data Integration using EGEE -
      Requirements and Ways Forward".

      After a short introduction, a 20 minute talk will be given
      by an EGEE middleware expert to introduce gLite data
      management services, followed by 10 minutes for
      questions. Then each of the HealthGrid projects present
      will present its requirements for data management and
      what it might wish for from EGEE. Then, the floor would
      be open for a round-table discussion with EGEE data
      management experts. Invited participants would be
      from the FP6 Healthgrid Projects and the NA4, SA1 and
      JRA1 groups in EGEE.

      • 16:00
        Round-table 1h 30m
        The goal of this round table is to identify issues relevant to data integration which are raised by the different Healthgrid projects and which could be better handled through a collaboration with EGEE
        Speakers: Dr Akos Frohner (CERN), Dr David Manset (GMaat), Dr Erwin Laure (CERN), Dr Jarek Nabrisky (Poznan Supercomputing Center), Dr Johan Montagnat (CNRS), Dr Kai Kumpf (SCAI Fraunhofer), Dr Konstantinos Koumantaros (GRNET), Dr Lingfen Sun (Univ. Plymouth), Dr Rolf Rumler (CNRS-IN2P3), Mr Yannick Legré (CNRS-IN2P3)
        Slides
    • 16:00 17:30
      South-East Europe Federation (NAs) Conf. Room 7+8

      Conf. Room 7+8

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This is open to the SEE Federation members from the 7
      countries (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Romania,
      Serbia, Turkey) with effort in the Networking Activities
      focusing on NA2, NA3 and NA4. The coordination of the
      federation efforts in those activities will be discussed.

    • 17:30 19:00
      Cocktail 1h 30m
    • 09:00 10:30
      Plenary: EGEE Applications (NA4) and Keynote by Dennis Gannon Conf. Room 1

      Conf. Room 1

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 09:00
        Characteristics of Grid Applications 45m
        The EGEE grid infrastructure see daily use by scientists from a sizable number of diverse disciplines. The large, production use reveals common access patterns which transcend individual scientific disciplines. Moreover, it suggests what common grid functionalities will be required in the near future. This talk classifies and characterizes the applications currently seen on the EGEE grid infrastructure and tries to foresee what additional services EGEE will need to provide in the future.
        Speaker: Dr Charles Loomis (LAL/Orsay)
        Slides
      • 09:45
        Building Gateways to Grid Capabilities 45m
        Large scale Grid systems such as EGEE, TeraGrid, NAREGI and others are designed to radically change the paradigm of scientific problem solving. They enable multidisciplinary teams, distributed around the globe, to share ideas, applications and data to solve problems at scales not previously considered possible. To accomplish this objective we have built a substantial middleware infrastructure (Globus, g-Lite, OGSA) that provides us with the core foundation of capabilities and services that support security, computation virtualization and data virtualization. Unfortunately, these services alone do not provide a platform for engaging the large majority of potential scientific and industrial users. They are simply too complex and, by their nature, too unreliable to use except for a small community of Grid experts. To engage the vast majority of potential users of Grids a category of tools and services, know in the TeraGrid project as Science Gateways, is emerging. They are built around web portal and desktop client technology and provide a layer of abstraction providing data and computational services in a language that is easily cast in terms of specific scientific domain languages. Portals like Genius, GridSphere and the Open Grid Computing Environment (OGCE) are being deployed for many scientific domains including bio-science, chemical informatics, astronomy, earth sciences, nano-technology and many industrial applications. This talk will examine the core services provided by these gateway tools including personal metadata catalogs, workflow tools, graphical user interfaces, and data provenance and publication services. We will look at what works and describe where we still need more research in the future.
        Speaker: Dr Dennis Gannon
        Slides
    • 10:30 11:00
      Coffee break 30m
    • 11:00 13:00
      Business: Data Management & Security Conf. Room 16

      Conf. Room 16

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Security & Data Management

      Industry is more hesitant toward the adoption of Grid
      computing with its main concerns over costs, data
      movement, security and performance. This session
      addresses these concerns in terms of discussing these
      concrete benefits.

      • 11:00
        Wenbo Mao, Principal Engineer, HP Labs China - On Dependability and Trustworthiness of the Grid 30m
        The architecture of the computational Grid has been thoughtfully engineered to achieve a high degree of dependability: quality services must always be available even if the presence of faults in the system may have a significant probability. We identify that, in the Grid architecture at present, the QoS in dependability is at the cost of a compromised trustworthiness. The compromise can in fact reduce or even nullify the very service of dependability if the Grid technology is deployed in a default setting of non-collegial environment. We present the work of the Daonity Project and discuss how Trusted Computing technologies can be applied to maintain QoS for both dependability and trustworthiness for the Grid. Daonity is an Open Grid Forum Project attempting to improve Grid Security Infrastructure using Trusted Computing technologies.
        Speaker: Mao WENBO
        Slides
      • 11:30
        Monica Marinucci - Oracle in R&D Programme Manager, Data and the Grid: A discussion on the role of a database in a distributed environment 1h 30m
        The creation, analysis and manipulation of data and meta-data lie at the heart of Grid Computing. This Grid data takes many forms and is widely distributed - characteristics that are not normally associated with database management systems (DBMS). However databases are today playing a major part in the development of grid computing. Oracle will facilitate a workshop to explore the use of DBMS within Grid computing. A range of distribution models will be covered together with data structure and access methods and two contrasting case studies will also be presented. Industry representatives and the R&D community are invited during the session to share ideas and to understand what can be done together to tackle open and specific issue related to the handling of data in distributed environments.
        Starting from the experiences presented, attendees are invited during and following the presentations to engage in a discussion to develop further ideas on how databases can best support data management in a Grid R&D environment and how the Scientific/R&D community and the Industry can best work together for the mutual benefit.
        · Current experiences and common approaches
        · Exchanging ideas and knowledge
        · Identifying common challenges and missing features
        · Outline possible solutions or steps forward
        Contributions will come from:
        Graeme Kerr - Oracle in R&D Programme Technical Architect, Oracle EMEA - Oracle’s approach to data distribution
        Gordon Brown Database Service Manager, RAL, CCLRC - The UK National Grid Services
        Dirk Duellmann Physics Service Manager, IT Dept., CERN - Data Replication on the CERN Grid
        Speaker: Monica MARINUCCI
    • 11:00 12:30
      Business: Grid & the Public Administration Conf. Room 18

      Conf. Room 18

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Grid & the Public Administration

      The 451 group recently showed in a study of early
      adopters of Grid computing that Government
      institutions featured at 10%. This session looks at how
      Grid and the EGEE solution may change the shape of
      Public Administration for the future.

      • 11:00
        Ian Osborne - Grid Computing Now! The UK Experience in the adoption of Grid Computing Technologies 20m
        Grid Computing Now! is a Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) project run as part of the UK Government's DTI Technology Programme. The aim of the Technology Programme is to promote the adoption of key technologies to improve UK economic development. Grid Computing Technologies are one such example having received a substantial amount of research duning in the past 6 years or so. The aim of the KTN is to capitalise on this learning and transfer knowledge about Grid Computing Technologies to UK Public and Private sector organisations who may benefit from its adoption. This presentation will describe the plan and key activities of the KTN, revealing some of its initial learnings as it reaches the half-way point. The key areas of interest and enthusiasm of the marketplace will be described, as will the more strategic attempts to engage Public sector organisations in considering the case for change. As the Technology Programme matures, several KTNs are combining their resources to address larger governmental challenges, there is considerable interest in the area of Intelligent Transport; e-Enabled infrastructure for collaboration and the potential to provide breakthroughs in Healthcare administration and treatment. There have been several Collaborative R&D Projects founded in these areas and this project is seen as a vehicle to champion their technology contributions.
        Speaker: Ian OSBORNE
        Slides
      • 11:20
        Sarah Cotgreave, Managing Director, Sourcing and Outsourcing Services Limited- Connecting UK Public Sector buyers and suppliers to trade electronically 20m
        Use of eCommerce tools which allow public sector buyers and sellers to trade over the internet is growing rapidly, driven by the EU targets. The i2010 targets state that “by 2010 all public administrations across Europe will have the capability of carrying out 100% of their procurement electronically, thus creating a fairer and more transparent market for all companies independent of a company’s size or location within the single market.” Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have or are implementing regulation that require suppliers to the public sector to submit invoices electronically. What has been the experience in the UK of implementing these systems and what are the concerns of public administrations and suppliers connecting on these types of systems which would have to be overcome by any potential solution using Grid Computing?
        Speaker: Sarah COTGREAVE
        Slides
      • 11:40
        William A Jones - CEO, Global Village Ltd - Public Administration drivers for Grid 20m
        Public Administration in the forms of Government Departments, Non Departmental Public Bodies (NDPB’s) and International Non Governmental Organisations (NGO’s) invest significant moneis in new technology, new solutions and new service delivery resources. This session will identify current drivers at domestic and international levels.
        Speaker: William JONES
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Simon Taylor, Brunel University Grid Alliance UK - GridAlliance Success Stories 20m
        As part of the GridAlliance, Brunel University is producing Desktop Grid systems that are being successfully used to reduce the take taken to turn around complex decisions. This presentation gives an overview of our general approach and examples of how it has been used to support decision making applications in the public sector, manufacturing and finance. For more information visit www.gridalliance.co.uk.
        Speaker: Simon TAYLOR
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:40
      Business: Grids & SMEs Conf. Room 15

      Conf. Room 15

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Grids & SMEs

      SMEs, who often cannot afford the time or the
      resources to research whether Grid could be a
      potential solution for them, do nevertheless, think
      fundamentally about their principal Business drivers
      which are: Time to Market, Doing New Things,
      Competition, Saving Money and Improving Performance.
      This session looks at how SMEs can consider these
      business drivers with Grid, specific case studies
      included.

      • 11:00
        Antonio Puliafito University of Messina - SMEs and Grid computing: The PI2S2 approach 20m
        This presentation focuses on aspects such as exploitation and sustainability of huge public investments in computing and communication infrastructures. In order to fully justify research activities and to promote their adoption at the production level, industries and public administration should be involved and fully motivated in approaching new and more effective technological solutions. The PI2S2 project, currently under development in Sicily, represents one concrete attempt to develop a new GRID computing infrastructure at the regional level, involving research institutions, public administration, industries and SMEs as potential users. Since the very beginning particular attention has been devoted in coordinating all the development activities with the requirements coming from SMEs that, strictly cooperating with the research institutions involved, are proposing and “bringing into the GRID” their specific needs. Synergy between academy and SMEs is a fruitful approach with mutual benefits for both participants and big impact on the future sustainability of the investments.
        Speaker: Antonio PULIAFITO
        Slides
      • 11:20
        James Purvis, CERN - e-procurement, the Grid & SMEs – roles, relationships & rewards 20m
        Faced with the challenges of streamlining and efficiency, CERN has recently implemented a leading-edge e-procurement solution which generates savings by automating the high-cost business processes previously associated with recurrent low-value purchases. The solution, which benefits both the supplier & the customer, is rapidly expanding and we observe significant interest in other large organisations following suite. The challenge now is to create a vision for SME participation (both as suppliers and/or customers) and question if emerging grid technologies may provide a canvass for such a picture.
        Speaker: James Purvis
        Slides
      • 11:40
        Joel Courquet, CS Project Manager - Industrial partners in EGEE: Turning experience into business - From SME’s to large company 20m
        The presentation will cover: SMEs: Describing the Grid environment developed for European Pole of Plasturgy and on the business model adopted. CNES (French Space Agency): Intraned grid prototype based on gLite. Fusion: Actions have been begun by CS SI with the TORE SUPRA CEA team and contact with the ITER project team, aimed at promoting the use of Grids by the fusion community. CS SI is pushing the idea of a “Grid hub portal” allowing the users to submit jobs on super computer infrastructure and also doing pre and post processing on EGEE.
        Speaker: Joel COURQUET
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Alex Efimov,Qi3 - EGEE Technology Market Evaluation: SME Perspective 20m
        Our research showed that British SME consider Grid as a valuable instrument for achieving their business objectives. The TME report includes a number of business cases which demonstrate how Grid could help small companies to do new things and improve performance. However, opportunities for SME to benefit from Grid technologies are limited by the following factors: • Lack of infrastructure • Lack of skills • Cost of ownership The main objective of this project is to find out how EGEE and other scientific grid projects could help SME to overcome the abovementioned difficulties and help companies to adopt Grid.
        Speaker: Alex EFIMOV
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:45
      ETICS early adopters Conf. Room 7+8

      Conf. Room 7+8

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This session will be the first opportunity to hear the
      feedback from the early adopters of ETICS, EGEE and
      DILIGENT. In particular, the EGEE activities involved
      with the gLite middleware (JRA1, SA3 and NA4) will be
      contributing.

      • 11:00
        ETICS Overview 15m
        Speaker: Dr Alberto Di Meglio (CERN)
        Slides
      • 11:15
        ETICS as part of the build, test and certification process of gLite 30m
        Speaker: Mr Laurence Field (CERN)
        Slides
      • 11:45
        Deployment test using ETICS 20m
        Speaker: Mr Pedro Andrade (CERN)
      • 12:05
        Integrating DILIGENT using ETICS 20m
        Speaker: Andrea Manieri (Unknown)
        Slides
      • 12:25
        Discussion 5m
    • 11:00 13:00
      Grid Applications (NA4) Conf. Room 3

      Conf. Room 3

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 11:00
        Introduction to the Grid Application Session 5m
        Speaker: Roberto Barbera (UNIV. CATANIA AND INFN)
      • 11:05
        Advances in the Grid enabled molecular simulator (GEMS) 10m
        The progress made in the implementation of the Grid enabled Molecular Simulator (GEMS) and the activities of the CompChem VO are presented.
        Speaker: Dr Osvaldo Gervasi (Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Perugia)
        Slides
      • 11:15
        Enabling Commercial Chemical Software on EGEE Grid – Gaussian VO 10m
        Today's computing and storage requirements make EGEE Grid a perfect platform for chemistry applications [1]. Despite the fact that a few quantum chemical codes have been successfully ported to the Grid [2] there is still lack of commercial chemical software that would be available for whole EGEE community. The main reasons blocking wide use of commercial software are its license requirements. Confirmation of fulfilling the license requirements is the key step in porting software to the Grid and than using it. There are many computational packages available nowadays for chemists. Among them the most popular for its easiness of use, large number of computational methods and constant development during the last thirty years is the Gaussian package [3,4]. The advantages of Gaussian make it an excellent choice for our application. Moreover, enabling to use the Gaussian package on the Grid by wider community will benefit not only in chemistry but also in biochemistry, medicine and even physics. In this report we would like to share our experience in enabling commercial software on the Grid using Gaussian program [5] as an example. In such a case access to the software is influenced by additional license requirements. Therefore, in order to meet these requirements, a new virtual organization (VO) gaussian has been created. Membership in gaussian VO enables user an access to Gaussian package operated and maintained by ACC Cyfronet AGH. The access to Gaussian package suite is open for each EGEE Grid user who does have a valid certificate and agrees to obey Gaussian, Inc. license requirements. Presented installation procedure may be used to make available other commercial software for EGEE community. References; 1. EGEE web page http://www.eu-egee.org 2. GAMESS package on EGEE Grid: http://egee.grid.cyfronet.pl/gamess 3. W. J. Henre, W. A. Lathan, R. Ditchfield, M. D. Newton, J. A. Pople, Gaussian 70, QCPE, 11, 236,1973 4. Gaussian web page: http://www.gaussian.com 5. Gaussian program on EGEE Grid: http://egee.grid.cyfronet.pl/gaussian
        Speaker: Dr Mariusz Sterzel (Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet)
        Slides
      • 11:25
        Applications development on the European Interactive Grid 10m
        The applications team of the int.eu.grid project is dedicated to promote the use of the Grid for those demanding scientific applications involving interativity and powerfull visualization needs. Grid added value in the int.eu.grid project means not only porting the application to a Grid infrastructure. It also implies to make profit of the development of an interactive environment for job submission, providing powerful graphics and visualization solutions. Being such services expensive from the point of view of Network connectivity we need to define some measure of Quality of Service to asses the reliability of the Network connection when facing this kind of challenges. So far we have engaged a number of applications which cover different aspects of needs in concerning the grid implementation of job submission, interactive steering, and visualization. We have catalogued the applications according to four area groups: High Energy Physics, Nuclear Fusion, Medical Applications and Environment. We have also included a section regarding prospective new applications which are currently under consideration, in particular collaborative environments with applications to medical diagnosis and Astrophysics.
        Speaker: Dr Isabel Campos Plasencia (Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria - CSIC)
      • 11:35
        Deployment of a gLite-based Grid Platform at CETIC 10m
        Context: Centre of Excellence in Information and Communication Technologies (CETIC) has a cluster of the following specifications:  Number of Nodes: 38 Number of Processors: 74 RAM size: 160 GB Disk storage: 10 TB This cluster will eventually be a part of the Belgian Grid. CETIC is seeking assistance from the EGEE project in the deployment and administration of this Grid platform. Scientific Goals: The Grid platform at CETIC will serve as a research test-bed to support experimentations, prototyping, simulations, and other associated research activities. The Grid platform will also be made accessible to companies for testing and benchmarking purposes. Description: As the Belgian Grid is going to switch from LCG-2 to gLite middleware, CETIC Grid will have to opt for the same middleware – gLite. The CETIC Grid team's objectives start from deploying a grid platform with a set of computing resources to administer it. Grid Added-value: Besides Belgian Grid (BEgrid), CETIC is a partner of a number of European projects including Business Experiments in Grid (BEinGRID) [1] and Highly Predictable Clusters for Internet Grids (HPC4U) [2]. These projects require Grid platform to facilitate the experimentation of the envisioned pilot applications. Potential User Community: CETIC has active collaborations with Belgian companies and universities. Moreover, CETIC is involved in a number of European projects [3]. There will be a broad spectrum of potential user community of CETIC Grid. It will comprise of academics, researchers, and industrial R&D teams. EGEE Impact: EGEE consortium has rich expertise in the deployment of Grid platforms. gLite is the middleware of the EGEE project. The experts from the EGEE consortium are in the most fortunate position to provide assistance in the deployment and administration of a gLite-based Grid platform. Grid Services Needed: It is difficult to quantify the set of Grid services sought by the CETIC, as the intended Grid platform will also be made accessible to companies for testing and benchmarking purposes and the required services will vary for every experiment. In other words, CETIC requires a comprehensive set of Grid services for its activities. Key Issues: The key issues include the successful deployment of a Grid platform, its administration, and its integration with the Belgian Grid so that experiments of the Grid projects can be performed, CETIC’s and its partners’ researchers can prototype and/or simulate their propositions. For example, prototyping of secure fault tolerant replica generation mechanism for Grid-based data management systems [4]. The Grid platform will also be made accessible to companies for testing and benchmarking purposes. References: 1. Business Experiments in Grid – www.beingrid.com 2. Highly Predictable clusters for Internet Grid (HPC4U) – http://www.hpc4u.org 3. CETIC Newsletter, January 2006 – www.cetic.be/article372.html 4. Naqvi S., Massonet P., Arenas A., 'Security Requirements Model for Grid Data Management Systems', International Workshop on Critical Information Infrastructure Security 2006 (CRITIS'06), August 30 – September 02, 2006, Samos Island, Greece
        Speaker: Dr Syed Naqvi (CETIC-CoreGRID)
        Slides
      • 11:45
        Edutain@Grid 10m
        Edutain@Grid is an exciting and ground breaking new project making use of Grid technology. The project will identify and define a new class of applications that are highly significant for Grid computing but have not been studied in the past, which we characterise as Real-Time Online Interactive Applications (ROIA). The distinctive features that make ROIA unique include large user concurrency to a single application instance, ad-hoc connections, competition-oriented Virtual Organisations, real-time interactive response, dynamically changing control and data application flows whilst maintaining high Quality of Service (QoS), user friendly security, and novel Business-to-Consumer market models. In order to overcome these challenges, the project team will develop a new middleware layer that will allow ROIA to exploit Grid computing and validate the system using two pilot applications from online gaming and e-learning domains. Edutain@Grid is expected to be of key interest to game developers and publishing companies by tackling some current key industry challenges: (1) larger user concurrency and high QoS ranging between 64128 players for fast action online games to thousand of players in persistent Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG); (2) standard API and scalable networks for cheaper integration and online game hosting. Similarly the benefits to the e-learning community are expected to be significant where large numbers of geographically disparate students can interact with instructors making use of large operational data sets. In particular this will be relevant to online simulations in scientific modelling applications used in the energy, defence, transport and legal market sectors. Furthermore Edutain@Grid is expected to attract new developers and development ideas that were not previously possible or simply cost prohibitive.
        Speaker: Prof. Thomas Fahringer (Institute of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck)
      • 11:55
        Archaeology on the grid: results and perpectives of ArchaeoGRID 10m
        ArchaeoGRID community aims to show that the archaeology, by deploying grid technology, will increase in quality and quantity the production, diffusion and use of archaeological knowledge. For this purpose the selected archaeological case study has been the origin of he city in the Mediterranean area between XI and VIII centuries B.C., that is a central problem in modern archaeology. The approach of such problem is based on landscape archaeology methods extended to the large Mediterranean region. The first application running on GILDA t-infrastructure is a paleoclimatic simulation based on MM5 mesoscale model and on geomorphological and archaeological data related with the studied period and region. The ArchaeoGRID system also, merging different approach in a single system and using a service-oriented architecture, has been studied with the help of GILDA and DILIGENT Pisa groups.
        Speaker: Prof. Pier Giovanni Pelfer (Dept. Physics, Univ. Florence and INFN)
        Slides
      • 12:05
        Summary/discussion on the first part of the session 25m
    • 11:00 12:30
      KnowArc Conf. Room 17

      Conf. Room 17

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This session will provide an introduction to the
      KnowARC project and discuss issues of interest to
      KnowARC and EGEE, including interoperability and
      diverse applications.

      • 11:00
        The KnowARC Project 15m
        Speaker: Farid Ould-Saada (Fysisk institutt)
        Slides
      • 11:15
        Status of the ARC middleware 20m
        Speaker: Mattias Ellert (CERN)
        Slides
      • 11:35
        Investigating interoperability in production grid middleware solutions 20m
        Speakers: Ferenc Szalai (NIIF, Hungary), Peter Stefan (NIFF, Hungary)
      • 11:55
        Status of ARC - gLiTe interoperability 20m
        Speakers: Chrulle Soettrup (NBI, Denmark), Mr Laurence Field (CERN)
        Slides
      • 12:15
        KnowARC applications in medicine, bioinformatics and industry 15m
        Speaker: Henning Mueller (University Hospitals, Geneva)
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      Life Sciences (NA4): Medical Imaging Conf. Room 2

      Conf. Room 2

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      The NA4 Life Sciences session will be the opportunity to
      review the status of the biomedical applications
      deployed on EGEE. Time will be dedicated to discussion
      with related projects and presentations selected from
      the conference call for abstracts.
      The session is divided in three subsessions dedicated
      to medical imaging, bioinformatics and drug discovery.

      Convener: Dr Johan Montagnat (CNRS)
      • 11:00
        GATE radiotherapy planning 10m
        Speaker: Dr L. Maigne
        Slides
      • 11:10
        3D MRI and PET simulation, cardiovascular image processing 10m
        Speaker: Dr Patrick Clarysse
        Slides
      • 11:20
        Medical Imaging Use Cases in Health-e-Child 10m
        Speaker: Dr Martin Huber
        Slides
      • 11:30
        SEE++ Strabismus surgery planning 10m
        Speaker: Dr K. Bosa
        Slides
      • 11:40
        SPM-based early diagnosis of Alzheimer's 10m
        Speaker: Dr L. Torterolo
        Slides
      • 11:50
        FreeSurfer-based brain images analysis 10m
        Speakers: Dr Arvid Lundervold, Dr Csaba Anderlik
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Establishing a Service Based Biomedical Infrastructure on the EGEE Grid with P-GRADE portal and GEMLCA 10m
        Speakers: Prof. Péter Kacsuk, Dr Robert Lovas
        Slides
      • 12:10
        Medical Data Manager deployment 10m
        Speaker: Mr R. Texier
        Slides
      • 12:20
        Wrap-up, overall activities, outstanding issues 10m
        Speaker: Dr J. Montagnat
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      NGI Workshop Conf. Room 13

      Conf. Room 13

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      (Closed)
      This session will map the current status of National Grid
      Initiatives in as many countries represented in the EGEE-
      II project as possible, as well as representatives from
      other areas where the NGI concept is debated. The
      inputs about the status of their
      National Grid Initiatives and / or major national Grid
      projects and efforts have been collected from participating
      countries via a pre-distributed questionnaire. The
      Policy Workshop will also give important information
      about the different countries' status. The perspectives for
      FP7 in each country will also be documented.

      • 11:00
        Introduction - Scope of the session 30m
        This slot will introduce the NGI policy workshop, which is a milestone of the EGEE NA5 activity (Policy and International Cooperation). It will identify the scope and expected result of the session.
        more information
        Slides
      • 11:30
        Update on FP7 EC calls 1h
        This session will provide input on the next EC calls of the Capacities - Research Infrastructures related to the NGIs/EGIs.
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      Security Coordination Group Office

      Office

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      (Closed meeting)




      This closed meeting will discuss and update the current
      EGEE
      Security coordination work.




      About SCG: The Security Coordination Group (SCG) is
      responsible for ensuring overall EGEE security
      coordination.
      This includes architecture, deployment, standardisation
      and
      cross-project concertation. The goal is to ensure the
      relationship between the various security-related work
      items
      inside the project do not adversely overlap (leading to
      duplication of effort) or leave gaps that could be
      exploited. In addition, the SCG is to coordinate a new
      security auditing activity. This activity will monitor both
      operations and middleware for security issues and
      report
      periodically on status and progress of the issues
      identified. The security audit will leverage the work of
      the
      Grid vulnerability issues group.

    • 11:00 12:30
      Swiss/German Federation Conf. Room 11

      Conf. Room 11

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      agenda
    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 14:00 15:30
      Business: Grid in Automative, Finance & Petroleum Conf. Room 4

      Conf. Room 4

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Grid in Automotive, Finance & Petroleum

      75% of major investment banks are already using Grid
      computing and Petroleum and Automotive look set to become
      an adopters of Grid technology.

      Focusing on these three areas, this session offers an
      overview of some deployed cases, the main achievements and
      obstacles involved to a wider deployment and success stories
      and how EGEE may support these sectors.



      Reporting & Initial Feedback

      The session includes the speakers of each of the
      parallel sessions within the Business Track to offer an
      overview of their session to share with the audience.

      Convener: Douglas McKinley (Metaware)
      • 14:00
        Robert B. Cohen, Fellow, Economic Strategy Institute - European Auto Firms and Grids 20m
        As part of a study supported by EGEE, this analysis has evaluated Grid adoption at Europe’s auto firms. It has compared these findings to results from earlier studies of Grid use in the auto industry in the US and Japan. The study’s initial findings are that Europe’s automakers have adopted Grids and are doing thousands of simulations a day to support design, product development, and testing. In at least one case, virtual cars are being used to manage production. One of the drivers for Grid deployment is the tremendous cost savings they offer. Preliminary estimates from the study suggest that during 2007-2010, auto firms will save about 25% of production costs each year. This will be a result of using Grids to support virtualized design and product development and creating virtual cars for production. European, American and Japanese auto firms are deploying firm-wide Enterprise Grids at about the same pace, with most firms expecting to have such Grids in place by 2009-2010. Collaboration Grids with links to partner firms (Partner Grids) are more evident in the US, but Europe and Japan will deploy these more rapidly than US firms later this decade. This preliminary analysis suggests that the IT-based model of Grid adoption does not represent how auto firms are adopting Grids. It suggests that Grid adoption is directly linked to managing the complexity that results from being able to use Grids. With thousands of simulations, auto firms need higher-level management capabilities linked to Grids to synchronize new findings with design models. With such capabilities, including dynamic provisioning and feedback mechanisms, Grid adoption would be faster.
        Speaker: Robert COHEN
        Slides
      • 14:20
        Piero Poccianti, Staff Planning and Strategic Development Consorzio Operativo Gruppo Monte dei Paschi Group (MPS) - From Web Services to Grid: Internal ad external use. Grid in Banks (Finance) 20m
        A recent study from Gartner Group shows that computing utilization of Intel platform is normally very low (from 15 to 30%). The use of an internal Grid computing infrastructure provides a way to maximize the computing utilization of resources, lowering cost and speeding some kind of processes. Monte dei Paschi, one of the most important banking group in Italy, started studying this kind of architecture since 2004 and set up a production environment in January 2005 for many different computing intensive applications. Today we forecast an evolution of our architecture for external services and for a new kind of sourcing strategy in ICT.
        Speaker: Piero POCCIANTI
        Slides
      • 14:40
        Moritz Weiten, Coordination of Research Projects ontoprise GmbH - Establishing Interoperability in Data Grids: The Automotive Use Case in the SIMDAT project 20m
        Complex processes in highly heterogeneous and distributed environments are a major challenge of industrial product development and service provisioning. Those processes typically involve a large number of independent organisational entities at different locations as well as different applications and data sources. Based on the application and enhancement of grid technology, this challenge is targeted in the EU-funded SIMDAT project [www.simdat.org]. SIMDAT focuses on four application areas: product design in the automotive, aerospace and pharma industry as well as service provisioning in meteorology. Within the first half of the project important parts of this matrix of technologies and application areas have successfully been established. Technologies for the distributed data access as well as semantic technologies have been combined in order to provide an environment which solves typical problems of heterogeneous data-grids involving complex engineering tools in the automotive area. This show-case demonstrates how the industrial production en-vironments can benefit from synergies by the combination of grid- and semantic technologies.
        Speaker: Moritz WEITEN
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Hannah Cumming TOTAL E&P UK PLC, Geoscience Research Centre - Total External Grid Project 20m
        The presentation will look briefly at Total Exploration & Production, high performance computing needs and the different avenues that it is looking at to fulfill these needs in the future. This presentation will focus on one of these areas, External Grid Computing, and give an overview of the current research project into External Grid Computing that is taking place at Total's UK based Research Centre. The research project involves porting an internal application to the gLite middleware/ EGEE Infrastructure to gain hands on experience and insight into the advantages/ disadvantages of External Grid Computing from Total's perspective.
        Speaker: Hanah CUMMING
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:35
      Central Europe Federation Conf. Room 17

      Conf. Room 17

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 14:00
        JRA1 (CESNET) 20m
        Presnetation of CESNET activities in JRA1
      • 14:20
        SA3 (PSNC) 10m
        Description of SA3 activities of PSNC
      • 14:30
        NA3 activities 35m
        1 presentation by each country involved 2-3 minutes per presentation
      • 15:05
        NA4 activities 30m
        1 presentation per each contry involved 5 minutes each
    • 14:00 15:30
      ETICS Technical Meeting (Closed meeting) Conf. Room 11

      Conf. Room 11

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This will be a closed meeting for members of ETICS to
      discuss the progress of the ETICS service. We will also
      debrief on the ETICS training event taking place on the
      24th September.

    • 14:00 15:30
      EU China Grid, IPv6 Conf. Room 16

      Conf. Room 16

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This meeting will follow up work begun in the
      EUChinaGrid workshop in June 2006. Specifically it will
      focus on the 'How to make a program IPv6 compliant'
      guide and the code checker, and then explore the views
      of developers from gLite and GOS.

      • 14:00
        Document "IPv6 guidelines for GRIDS’ programmers" 25m
        Speaker: Valentino Carcione (GARR)
        Slides
      • 14:25
        IPv6 code checker tool 20m
        Speaker: Salvatore Monforte (INFN Sezione di Catania)
        Slides
      • 14:45
        GOS on IPv6 15m
        Speaker: Yongjian Wang (Beihang University)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Report "IPv6 and Grid middleware" 10m
        Speaker: Paola Celio (Università di Roma Tre)
        Slides
      • 15:10
        Panel: EGEE and EUChinaGRID interactions about IPv6 20m
    • 14:00 16:00
      Grid Applications (NA4) Conf. Room 3

      Conf. Room 3

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 14:00
        International Telecommunication Union Regional Radio Conference and the EGEE Grid 10m
        The Radiocommunication Bureau of the ITU (ITU-BR) managed the preparation and the conduct of the ITU Regional Radio Conference RRC06 to establish a new frequency plan for the introduction of digital broadcasting (band III and IV/V) in Europe, Africa, Arab States and former-USSR States. During the 5 weeks of the RRC06 Conference (15 May to 16 June 2006) delegations from 119 Member States negotiated the frequency plan. The frequency plan was established in an iterative way. During week time at the RRC06 administrations negotiated and submitted their broadcasting requirements to the ITU-BR and the associated results of negotiation (sometime in terms of several million records). The ITU/BR carried out over the weekend, substantive validation and processing activities and conducted all the calculations (analysis and synthesis) that resulted in assigning specific frequencies for the draft plan. The result of the calculations was distributed to delegations at the beginning of the subsequent week and served as input for the next round of negotiations, with the last iteration constituting the basis for the final frequency plan. In addition, partial calculations were performed for parts of the planning area in between two global iterations (for the entire planning area). For obtaining optimum planning of the available frequency spectrum, two different software processes have been developed by the European Broadcasting Union and they have been run in sequence at the Conference by ITU/BR: compatibility assessment and plan synthesis. The compatibility assessment (which was very CPU demanding and adapted to run on a distributed infrastructure) calculated the interference between digital requirements, analogue broadcasting and other services stations. The plan synthesis assigned channels to requirements which could share the same channel. The limited time to perform the calculation called for the optimization of the process. The turnaround time to provide a new set of results was a critical factor for the success of the Conference. The EGEE grid greatly enhanced the ITU-BR available resources, constituted by a 100 PCs client-server distributed system developed within the ITU-BR. The compatibility assessment consisted in running a large number of jobs (some tens of thousands). Each job is basically the same application running on different datasets representing the parameters of radio-stations. One should note that the execution time varied by more than 3 orders of magnitudes (the majority of jobs needed only few seconds but few jobs required many hours) depending on the input parameters and could not be completely predicted. To cope with this situation we decided to use a client-server system called DIANE that allows run-time load balancing, access to heterogeneous resources (Grid and local cluster at the same time) and a robust infrastructure to cope with run-time problems. In the DIANE terminology, a job is defined as a “task”. DIANE allowed us to use in the most effective way the available resources since in this system each available worker nodes asks for the next task: while a long task will “block” a node, in the mean time the short tasks (the large majority) will flow through the other nodes. We demonstrated to be able to perform the required calculations on the EGEE/LCG infrastructure during feasibility tests performed in November 2006 and we used these techniques during the Conference in very close collaboration with CERN. We were also able to integrate the EGEE infrastructure with the ITU-BR distributed system at the monitoring level, via the Caltech-developed product MonALISA. The EGEE infrastructure did not only enable us to give the adequate support for an important international event but, in addition, the substantial speed-up observed opened the possibility to allow faster and more detailed studies during the Conference. The technical improvement gave the possibility to provide a better service and technical data to the Conference’s delegates. Our set up was well suited for this application. The possibility to access resources from the grid and corporate resources (which we have not exploiting) is very appealing and should be interesting for other users. The possibility to describe and execute more complex workflow (presently we are using the system to execute independent tasks in parallel) could increase the interest for the tools we have been using.
        Speaker: Dr Andrea Manara (ITU-BR)
        Slides
      • 14:10
        Experience on Grid Production for GEANT4 10m
        Geant4 is a general purpose toolkit for simulating the tracking and interaction of particles through matter. It is currently used in production in several particle physics experiments (BaBar, HARP, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb), and it has also applications in other areas, as space science, medical applications, and radiation studies. The complexity of the Geant4 code requires careful testing of all of its components, especially before major releases (which happens twice a year, in June and December) including detailed regression testing on complex configurations. We describe the recent development of an automatic suite for testing physical processes in high-energy calorimetry. The idea is to use a simplified set of hadronic calorimeters, with different beam particles at, several beam energies, and comparing relevant observables with the reference version of Geant4. Only those distributions that are statistically incompatible are then printed out and finally inspected by a person to look for possible bugs. The suite is made of Python scripts, and utilizes the "Statistical Toolkit" for the statistical tests between pair of distributions, and runs on the Grid to cope with the large amount of CPU needed in a short period of time. The total CPU time required for each of these Geant4 release validation productions amounts to about4 CPU-years, which have to be concentrated in a couple of weeks. The Geant4 team has already run four of them, starting in December 2004. From December 2005 they run as Geant4 VO demonstrating the full involvement of Geant4 inside the EGEE communities. Several EGEE sites have provided them with the needed CPU, and this has guaranteed the success of the production, arriving to an overall efficiency rate of about 99%. We report the Geant4 experience in using the Grid, and in particular the results obtained during the last production (June 2006). During that production we used the Ganga/Diane framework developed by the ARDA group at CERN was used for. the 10% of the production with very promising results. The next production (December 2006) will be fully executed using this framework and we present the present status of the preparation.
        Speaker: Dr Patricia Mendez Lorenzo (CERN IT/PSS)
        Slides
      • 14:20
        Integration of the ATLAS Production System with the Distributed Data Management on the EGEE Grid Infrastructure 10m
        In the last 2 years, the ATLAS collaboration has been continuously running Monte Carlo event simulation on the LCG/EGEE production grid. The ATLAS production system is highly automated: jobs defined in a central database are handled by supervising agents, submitted to and executed by the underlying Grid infrastructure. On the other side, more recently the ATLAS Distributed Dada Management System also became fully functional on EGEE. Such a system guarantees organization of data in a hierarchical structure (datasets) and data distribution across sites via asynchronous file transfer mechanisms. The ATLAS Production and the Distributed Data Management systems have been now fully integrated on the EGEE infrastructure. Running the new framework should improve the activity organization (production tasks assigned to specific groups of tiers) and data distribution and availability (datasets automatically aggregated in well defined computer centers). Data aggregation will be particularly important for subsequent activities such as data analysis. This contribution provides an architectural overview of the integrated system and a description of our operational experience, showing the improvements in respect of the past, current issues and possible future developments.
        Speaker: Dr Simone Campana (CERN/IT/PSS and INFN/CNAF)
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Enabling Grids for Neutron Science 10m
        The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) is constructing Australia’s new 300 million Australian dollar (178 million euros) Open Pool Australian Light-Water (OPAL) reactor for neutron scattering research. Each neutron beam instrument from OPAL will provide a graphical user interface, known as GumTree, for performing data acquisition and online data analysis. GumTree is an Eclipse RCP based open sourced application which involves international collaboration with a number of major neutron and X-ray facilities. It is proposed that GumTree will connect to the Grid infrastructure in near future for computational intensive data analysis, via the DANSE framework. The DANSE project from Caltech has been awards 11.97 million US dollar funding from the US National Science Foundation for providing software on distributed data analysis of neutron scattering. ANSTO also has a long-term commitment on providing eResearch services to the neutron community, such as archiving instrument raw data to the national grid, and gridifying existing instruments with CIMA middleware.
        Speaker: Mr Tony Lam (Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation)
      • 14:40
        The ATLAS and CMS Experience with the gLite Workload Management System 10m
        The ATLAS and CMS experiments have extensively tested the gLite Workload Management System by running real applications on the EGEE production infrastructure. This allowed to study the behaviour of the system in a more realistic environment with respect to the official certification infrastructure. This contribution describes the work performed by the experiments on the gLite WMS and how this contributed to improve its reliability and performance, thanks to a close collaboration with the developers and the certification team of the EGEE project.
        Speaker: Dr Andrea Sciaba' (CERN)
        Slides
      • 14:50
        Preliminary results from the LHCb Data Challenge 2006 10m
        The 2006 data challenge – LHCb DC06 – is the final benchmark before the real data taking for validating the computing model and the infrastructure of LHCb and also a last opportunity for exercising the whole simulation chain on EGEE resources. For the past few years, LHCb has always been one of the top users of LCG resources gathering considerable experience in distributed computing at a large scale. The central part of the system is DIRAC (Distributed Infrastructure with Remote Agent Control), which is the experiment gateway to the Grid environment. The aim of this work is to present a preliminary experience from this ongoing DC06 and its goals, describing the DIRAC system, the performances achieved, and the problems observed. The DC06 has started in August 2006 and it is expected to continue until the end of September. We will therefore describe the achievements and the plans for the continuation of this activity.
        Speaker: Dr Roberto Santinelli (CERN/IT/GD)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Instruments and Sensors on the Grid: the GridCC project 10m
        Traditional developments in Grid technologies have concentrated on providing batch access to distributed computational and storage resources. The requirements to access, control, and acquire data from widely networked distributed instruments trigger the need to include a variety of new components. For instance, scientific equipment like sensors and probes are a need in nowadays Grid infrastructures. This, in turn, raises the need for supporting real-time operations and interactive work, thus opening a new frontier of research and development in this field. The GridCC Project, launched in September 2004 by the European Union, addresses these issues. The goal of GridCC is to exploit Grid opportunities for secure and collaborative work of distributed teams to remotely operate and monitor scientific equipment. In addition, GridCC will allow to exploit the Grid’s massive memory and computing resources for storing and processing data generated by this kind of equipment. In this talk we present first the status of the GridCC Project, focusing then on the real applications that have been equipped with our middleware. We have three main running use cases, from the run control of a high energy physics experiments, to the remote control and monitoring of a grid of small power generators and, finally, to the far remote operation of a particle accelerator. Other applications that have adopted our approach will be also presented; their field ranges from meteorology, to education, to the control of the territory (geo-hazard) and to the remote control and monitoring operations of telecommunication measurement equipment. Lastly, the integration with the gLite components will be highlighted, showing how the services’ orchestration through a workflow engine has been introduced. Our approach, based ontwo levels (namely, strict and loose) of guarantees to support and monitor the real-time and interactive requirements will be also shown.
        Speaker: Dr Gaetano Maron (Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro)
        Slides
      • 15:10
        GENIUS Grid Portal for e-Science community: a new experience for managing workflow in a SOA 10m
        Scientists, as biologists or bioinformaticians, often deal with complex tasks involving the integration of results from several computational tools and information repositories that must be tied together in a coordinated way in order to automate the execution of a set of analyses. With the increasing number of databases and processing tools exposed as Web Services, a workflow managing system able to operate according to the SOA standards is an essential tool for e-Scientists to take full advantage of such resources. In a scenario where data sources and services are distributed and there is an increasing request for computational power, special attention has been given to workflows based on Grid services which bring many attractive characteristics such as great efficiency, load balancing, fault tolerance and reliability. Making use of SOA principles, Grid-enabled workflows make Grid solutions more transparent and supported on a wider range of platforms and environments, improving interoperability among software applications. Many tools have been developed for the composition and enactment of workflows for the scientific community but most of today workflow management systems show great limitations due to their intrinsic client-only nature. Nice s.r.l. with EnginFrame /GENIUS Grid portal/gateway realizes several integrations of the Grid technology with the Web Services standards based SOA approach. Addressing to e-Science community, Nice proposes a Grid-based solution that provides basic building blocks for workflow construction. This solution both exposes services as standard Web Services to be used within a client-side workflow engine (Taverna ), and supports workflow enactment and life cycle management through the batch submission of a server-side workflow engine (Moteur ). Applications running on a Grid can be exposed by EnginFrame as WSDL/SOAP standards Web Services and made available, inside a service-oriented architecture, to consumer applications. Furthermore EnginFrame technology hides the complexity of the underlying Grid infrastructure and provides an additional user-oriented abstraction layer on the Grid. The most important goal is the introduction of a server-side component for the execution of workflows on a Grid infrastructure away from user workstation. This provides advantages from both user’s and administrator’s point of view. Users don’t have to install any software tools and worry about software upgrade and maintenance but simply run and monitor their own workflows from everywhere using a standard Web browser. On the other hand, administrators have a full control of workflow access and submissions. Moreover, thanks to multi-platform architecture, this solution can greatly simplify the development.
        Speaker: Ms Livia Torterolo (Bio-lab, DIST, University of Genoa)
        Slides
      • 15:20
        The Diligent prototype and the experiences gained joining the EGEE PPS infrastructure 10m
        Diligent is an ongoing IST project that aims to combine Grid and Digital Library (DL) technologies in order to provide an advanced test-bed DL infrastructure allowing members of dynamic virtual e-Science organizations to access shared knowledge and to collaborate in a secure, coordinated, dynamic and cost-effective way. In particular, Diligent builds on top of the Enabling Grid for E-sciencE (EGEE) project which is providing the one of the largest European Grid Infrastructure and the support to the gLite Grid middleware. From an abstract point of view, the Diligent infrastructure acts as a DL broker, where the clients of the broker are DL resource providers and consumers. The providers are the individuals and the organisations that decide to make available, under the supervision of the infrastructure, their resources according to certain access and use policies. The consumers are the user communities that want to build their own DLs. The resources managed by this broker are of different types: collections (i.e., set of information objects searchable and accessible through a single “access point”), services (i.e., software tools implementing a specific functionality and whose descriptions, interfaces and bindings are defined and publicly available), hosting nodes (i.e., networked entities that offer computing and storage capabilities and supply an environment for hosting collections and services), and EGEE resources (i.e., computing elements and storage elements). In order to support the controlled sharing of resources among providers and consumers, the Diligent infrastructure relies on the virtual organizations (VOs) mechanism that has been introduced in the Grid research area. This mechanism models set of users and resources aggregated together by highly controlled sharing rules, usually based on an authentication framework. By exploiting appropriate mechanisms provided by the infrastructure, providers register their Diligent resources by supplying a description of them. According to the type of resources provided, the infrastructure also automatically extracts other properties that are used to enrich the explicit description. The infrastructure takes care of the management of the registered resources by supporting their discovery, monitoring, reservation, and by implementing the functionality needed to support the required controlled sharing and quality of service. A user community can create one or more DLs by specifying a set of requirements and by appropriately combining the available resources. These requirements specify conditions on the information space (e.g., the set of collections, subject of the content, documents type), on the services for supporting the work of the users (e.g., type of search), on the quality of service (e.g., availability, performance, security) and on many other aspects, like the maximum cost, lifetime, etc. The DL broker satisfies the given requirements by selecting, and in many cases also deploying, a number of resources among those accessible to the community, gluing them appropriately and, finally, making the new DL application accessible through a portal. The composition of a DL is dynamic since the infrastructure continuously monitors the status of the DL resources and, if necessary, changes them in order to offer the best quality of service. Therefore, DLs (possibly serving different communities) can be created and modified on-the-fly, without considerable investments and changes in the organisations that set them up. The potential of the Diligent infrastructure is being demonstrated and validated over two complementary real-life application scenarios deriving from the environmental e-Science, named ImpECt, and the cultural heritage, named ARTE, domains. ImpECt (Implementation of Environmental Conventions) includes leading actors in the environmental sector, and is represented by the European Space Agency (ESA). This community exploits the DILIGENT to support conference organisation and the preparation of projects and periodical reports. International and regional conventions related to earth observation represent the framework for formulating international environmental agreements. These conventions are continuously evolving and thematic areas are specialising. Yet, information sources are dispersed among environmental agencies and a DILIGENT-based DL could be the most appropriate tool to enable this community to more effectively coordinate actions. ARTE is a community of scholars located all over the world, working together to establish a new discipline that merges experiences from research in humanities, social sciences and communication. In order to achieve their objectives these researchers require a common background knowledge base. The DILIGENT platform provides them, in a short time framework, a cost-effective instrument for setting up DLs, i.e. common multimedia knowledge repositories equipped with a number of services, specifically tailored to the needs of this community. The ARTE community is represented in DILIGENT by the Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS), one of the partners contributing rich archives of texts and images. Audio-video content is being provided by the Italian National Broadcasting RAI Educational. The Diligent project is currently testing the first prototype that will be delivered by the end of September ’06. According to the Diligent implementation plan, this version is not fully-fledged. Rather it supports the basic DL functionalities required to satisfy the main user communities’ requirements. All the DL functionalities: (i) have been designed in accordance with the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm, (ii) have been implemented as WSRF compliant service elements, and (iii) are powered by the EGEE gLite middleware components. In particular, this prototype provides: • On-demand services deployment on nodes equipped with the Diligent VO box; • Content security handling (access and watermarking policies); • Semantic content management over a gLite superimposed storage management layer; • Metadata management and indexing; • Annotation management and visualisation; • Complex process visual design, verification, optimisation and execution; • Text, image, sound, video and multimedia content processing; • Information visualisation; • Information retrieval out of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data; • Support for application-specific extensions. In addition to the above functionalities, application specific ones have been integrated to better support the two user communities. The aim of this talk is to present the Diligent prototype. In particular, the talk focuses on a specific functionality, relevant to the ARTE community, dealing with the management of copyrighted videos on the gLite based Grid infrastructure. It has been implemented exploiting the process visual design, verification, and optimisation capabilities to combine content and metadata management, content security handling, and indexing. The so designed workflow allows to import, secure, and make available generic set of videos originally stored in a storage device. This complex workflow has been executed on the Diligent sites belonging to the EGEE PPS infrastructure and a set of statistics have been collected.
        Speakers: Dr Pasquale Pagano (CNR-ISTI), Dr Pedro Andrade (CERN)
        Slides
      • 15:30
        Summary/discussion of the session 30m
    • 14:00 15:30
      Grid Security Vulnerability Group (Closed meeting) Conf. Room 15

      Conf. Room 15

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      CLOSED MEETING

      The Grid Security Vulnerability Group meeting will be a
      closed meeting, for GSVG/Task TSA1.4.2 members, and
      others by invitation. It will be roughly divided into 3.
      We will briefly review the procedures for tackling specific
      issues, and sort out any remaining problems. We will
      discuss the other vulnerability work we will do, other
      than the specific issues group, in particular to progress
      work of some people who are providing effort to the
      task but are not in the issues group. We will
      also discuss plans for producing the deliverable
      DSA1.3, "Grid Services Security Vulnerability and Risk
      Analysis" which is a Month 10 deliverable of task
      TSA1.4.2.



      If you are not already involved with the GSVG and
      would like to attend the meeting, please contact
      L.A.Cornwall@rl.ac.uk

      • 14:00
        Review of Grid Security Vulnerability Issues process 50m
        We will briefly review the process, and discuss any outstanding points.
        Speaker: Dr Linda Cornwall (RAL)
      • 14:50
        Vulnerability testing 20m
        Presentation of plans for vulnerability testing
      • 15:10
        SWE contribution to the Grid Security Vulnerability Task 20m
    • 14:00 15:30
      Grid operation CIC on Duty (COD-10) (closed meeting) Conf. Room 18

      Conf. Room 18

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Meeting of COD-on-Duty teams operating the daily
      monitoring
      of the EGEE/LCG grid: feedback is collected, procedures
      and
      tools are discussed and enhanced.

      • 14:00
        Feedback from DE-CH and SWE federations 30m
      • 14:30
        Operations procedures and tools update 30m
      • 15:00
        Failover procedures and tools update 30m
    • 14:00 15:30
      ICEAGE Forum Conf. Room 7+8

      Conf. Room 7+8

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      The ICEAGE forum is a meeting of world experts in grids
      and education which
      has the function of developing policy, standards and
      collecting best
      practice with the aim of supporting academic uptake of
      grid teaching.
      The meeting of the Forum in Geneva is paired with an
      earlier meeting at the
      OGF conference in Washington, to allow contributions
      from both the
      US/Pacific Rim and Europe.

      These meetings will build on the successful inaugural
      meeting of the Forum
      in Italy in July.

    • 14:00 15:30
      Life Sciences (NA4): Bioinformatics Conf. Room 2

      Conf. Room 2

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      The NA4 Life Sciences session will be the opportunity to
      review the status of the biomedical applications
      deployed on EGEE. Time will be dedicated to discussion
      with related projects and presentations selected from
      the conference call for abstracts.
      The session is divided in three subsessions dedicated
      to medical imaging, bioinformatics and drug discovery.

      Convener: Dr Christophe Blanchet (CNRS IBCP)
      • 14:00
        Status of Bioinformatics in EGEE-2 5m
        Overview and status of the Bioinformatics Applications in EGEE-2
        Speaker: Dr Christophe Blanchet (CNRS IBCP)
        Slides
      • 14:05
        Service to Encrypt Biological Data on Grid 10m
        Biological data are most times published and then become public ones. They, then, do not need to be isolated or encrypted. But, in some cases, these data stemed from patients or are analyzed with, for instance, pharmaceutical or agronomics goals. Also in simple ways , these data, before to become public, have to be kept confidential while researchers haven’t been able to publish their work or to register them. So they are a lot of cases where the integrity and the confidentiality of biological data have to be protected against unauthorized accesses. But, as these private data are also large datasets, they need high-throughput computing and huge data storage to processed, such as ones produced by complete genome projects. These requirements are enhanced in the context of a Grid, where the computing and storage resources are distributed across a large-scale platform. We have developed a distributed service to securize biological data on grid: the EncFile encrypted files management system. We have used it on the production platform of the EGEE grid project. Thus we provided grid users with a user-friendly component that doesn’t require any user privileges.
        Speaker: Mr Remi Mollon (CNRS IBCP)
        Slides
      • 14:15
        Enabling bioinformatics applications to access files over the grid via a GFAL plugin to Parrot 10m
        One of the problems encountered while porting, in the framework of the BIOINFOGRID EU project, bioinformatics applications to the GRID, concerns their input-output. Many of the widely used tools in bioinformatics, have been developed when the grid technology was not yet established, so they make their input out from the computer local disk. To port such an application on the grid, one has to handle case when the WN local disk has a local disk not sufficient to contain the job input output files as well as cases when the WM is completely disk less. In such cases it is difficult to change the application code, which generally was not developed by the researcher, and sometimes it also difficult to make use of specific libraries that could allow the remote file access. Parrot represents a possible solution to the problem since it allow the use of a variety of protocols to map the file-system call, such for example gridftp and http. We will report on a development to further improve the versatility of Parrot and its usability on the EGEE infrastructure. In particular we have developed a plugin for Parrot which uses the GFAL API directly. In this case the application can run using only the Logical File Name (LFN) of the required input output files and does not have to worry about the details of the underlying storage system use in the EGEE grid. Along the same line we have also developed a similar filesystem which will use GFAL API and FUSE. As FUSE is the most widely used system to use remote file services as a local file on linux. Fuse also has been integrated in linux kernel and this makes more easy to implement it on linux environment. Now we are involved in an intense testing of both the two implementation. The most important Grid services involved in this work are the Storage Services and the File Catalog Services. References: 1) Parrot: http://www.cse.nd.edu/~ccl/software/parrot/ 2) FUSE: http://fuse.sourceforge.net/
        Speaker: Dr Giacinto Donvito (INFN-BARI)
        Slides
      • 14:25
        GPS@, Web interface for Protein Sequence Analysis on Grid 10m
        Bioinformatics analysis of data produced by high-throughput biology, for instance genome projects [1], is one of the major challenges for the next years. Some requirements of such analysis are to access up-to-date databanks (of sequences, patterns, 3D structures, etc.) and relevant algorithms ( sequence similarity, multiple alignment, pattern scanning, etc.) [2]. Since 1998, we are developing the NPS@ Web server ([3], Network Protein Sequence Analysis), that provides the biologist with many of the most common resources for protein sequence analysis, integrated into a common workflow. These methods and data can be accessed through simple web browsing and HTTP connection, or througth high-level bioinformatics interface like MPSA or AntheProt programs. GPS@ Web portal (Grid Protein Sequence Analysis, http://gpsa-pbil.ibcp.fr) is the grid-enabled release of the NPS@ bioinformatics portal. GPS@ hides mechanisms required for submitting bioinformatics analyses on the grid infrastructure. By simply selecting the “EGEE” check-box, GPS@ will schedule the submission of the BLAST computation on the EGEE grid when clicking on the “submit” button. The bioinformatics algorithms and databases available on GPS@ have been distributed and registered on the grid and GPS@ runs its own EGEE interface to the grid. GPS@ portal makes the Bioinformatics job submission easier on the grid, and provide biologists with the benefit of the EGEE grid infrastructure to analyze large biological dataset: for example including several protein secondary structure predictions into a multiple alignment, or clustering a sequence set by analyzing, with BLAST or SSEARCH, each sequence against the others. [1] Bernal, A., Ear, U., Kyrpides, N. : Genomes OnLine Database (GOLD): a monitor of genome projects world-wide. NAR 29 (2001) 126-127 [2] G. Perrière, C. Combet, S. Penel, C. Blanchet, J. Thioulouse, C. Geourjon, J. Grassot, C. Charavay, M. Gouy, L. Duret and G. Deléage, Integrated databanks access and sequence/structure analysis services at the PBIL. Nucleic Acids Res., 31:3393-3399, 2003. [3] Combet, C., Blanchet, C., Geourjon, C. et Deléage, G. : NPS@: Network Protein Sequence Analysis. Tibs, 25 (2000) 147-150.
        Speaker: Dr Christophe Blanchet (CNRS IBCP)
        Slides
      • 14:35
        Blast In Grid (BIG) 10m
        The vast amount in complexity of data generated in Genomic Research implies that new dedicated and powerful computational tools need to be developed to meet their analysis requirements. Blast in Grid (Big) is a Grid- enabled Blast service that enables bioinformatic users to deal with datasets up to the order of hundreds of thousand sequences. Many efforts have been done in the literature concerning the speeding up of Blast searches, but few of them deal with the use of large heterogeneous production Grid Infrastructures. These are the infrastructures that could reach the largest number of resources and the best load balancing for data access. The Grid Service under development will analyse requests based on the number of sequences, splitting them accordingly to the available resources. Lower-level computation will be performed through MPIBLAST. The software architecture is based on the WSRF standard.
        Speaker: Dr Ignacio Blanquer Espert (DSIC)
        Slides
      • 14:45
        Bringing 3D-EM to the Grid 10m
        Bringing 3D-EM to the Grid. --------------------------- 3D-EM is a well established technique that allows us to visualize biological structures across a wide range of sizes. As such, it provides a bridge between more fine-grained techniques (such as X-ray crystallography or NMR) and coarser methods like traditional light microscopy, making an un-substitutable tool for understanding subcellular structures and macromolecular assemblies. Its main downside being the heavy demands on compute power at some steps of the analytical process. We have undertaken the project of bringing 3D-EM techniques to the Grid. Initial tests with 3D reconstruction yielded poor speedup results turning up important lessons for subsequent work. We are now dealing with ML classification of data, proceeding to refactor Xmipp and dealing with the major blockstoppers detected. Still, some relevant issues worth noting still remain that result in major conceptual challenges. In this presentation we deal with the general problem of 3D-EM in its experimental context, describe our approach, preliminary results and directions for future work.
        Speaker: Mrs Germán Carrera (Centro Nacional de Biotecnología CSIC)
        Slides
      • 14:55
        Parallelised Monte-Carlo simulation of large biological networks using the EGEE grid 10m
        Modelling and simulation techniques are valuable tools for the understanding of biological systems. Such systems can be described by a set of constraint biochemical reactions and translated into a system of differential equations. Each reaction has substrates and products with given stoichiometries, and modifiers or catalysts that affect the reaction kinetics. Often the topology of these biochemical reaction systems is known and available from databases, but the detailed reaction kinetics and their kinetic parameters are not well known. To overcome this problem we propose a Monte-Carlo approach, where we simulate different biological scenarios of certain interest with kinetic parameters chosen from a given random distribution. By repeating these simulations several times with different sets of kinetic parameters differences in the behaviour of the different models that reflect certain biological scenarios can be identified. Depending on the size of the model a single simulation can take several minutes to up to an hour so that for this approach an immense computational power is required. To do this in a maintainable time a parallelisation of the approach is required. We will present this approach and its realisation using the EGEE grid technology.
        Speaker: Dr Christoph Wierling (Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics)
        Slides
      • 15:05
        Status of the Biomedical Applications in EELA 10m
        Presentation of the EELA project, E-infrastructure shared between Europe and Latin America, status and perspectives of the biomedical applications.
        Speaker: Vicente Hernandez-Garcia (Polytechnical University of Valencia)
        Slides
      • 15:15
        A GRID PLATFORM FOR ITALIAN BIOINFORMATICS 10m
        The LIBI (International Laboratory for Informatics) is a project, leadED by PROF. CECILIA SACCONE of the Institute of Biomedical Technologies of the italian National Research Council (CNR) and supported by the Italian Minister for Research, which collects leading italian institutes in bioinformatics working together with technological partnerS with the aim to built a virtual Laboratory with a modern infrastructure supporting the life science research in Italy. For its HT, high throughput, applications, LIBI has adopted the gLite Middleware and the EGEE infrastructure: a farm with 28 CPU is already part of the EGEE grid branch managed by the italian ROC. The use of the grid technology by the LIBI, is dictated by the enormous computational resources required by particular applications. For example the GenoMiner application (Castrignanò et al., 2006) intends to carry out cross-genome comparisons with the aim to detect highly conserved sequences, LIKELY INVOLVED IN CODING OR REGULATORY ACTIVITY. A complex procedure has been ADOPTED in order to improve the speed of the comparison and to limit the search to selected parts of the genomes. However, the grid is needed to validate the entire procedure. For this reason a grid application has been set up to compares each tract of the human genome with the whole rat genome. An overall number of more of 2000 Million sequence comparison is required, where each of them can take up to 2-3 seconds. In order to keep track of the comparison correctly executed a "task-queue" schema based on Database server suitably implemented. The "task-queue" is capable of managing multiple dependencies between tasks, it keeps tracks of the grid-job-id to which is demanded the execution of a specific task. It keeps also track of the number of attemptS to execute a particular task in order to avoid the resubmission of jobs that "always" fail. There is also the possibility to choose the priority of some of the tasks in order to run them in the correct sequence. The DB server used by the task queue can also be used to monitor the status of the application. This feature gives the possibility to the user to control the status of all the jobs running and executed in a very easy way. The main Grid Services used by this application are the Storage Services, to collect the the huge amount of output date produced by the application, and the Workload Management System to choose the best farms with free CPU's that can run the application and to transport in a reliable way the crucial files needed on the WN. The challenge is actually running on the Italian gLite infrastructure (INFN-GRID): more then 450 thousands sequences comparisons have been performed in a month time. References: 1) Castrignano T, De Meo PD, Grillo G, Liuni S, Mignone F, Talamo IG, Pesole G. GenoMiner: a tool for genome-wide search of coding and non-coding conserved sequence tags. Bioinformatics. 2006 22(4):497-9. 2) LIBI: http://www.libi.it/ 3) CSTminer: http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/32/suppl_2/W624
        Speaker: Dr Giacinto Donvito (INFN-BARI)
        Slides
      • 15:25
        Perspectives in Bioinformatics area 5m
        Conclusion and perspectives about Bioinformatics activity in EGEE-2.
        Speaker: Dr Christophe Blanchet (CNRS IBCP)
    • 14:00 15:30
      NGI Workshop Conf. Room 13

      Conf. Room 13

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      (Closed)
      This session will map the current status of National Grid
      Initiatives in as many countries represented in the EGEE-
      II project as possible, as well as representatives from
      other areas where the NGI concept is debated. The
      inputs about the status of their
      National Grid Initiatives and / or major national Grid
      projects and efforts have been collected from participating
      countries via a pre-distributed questionnaire. The
      Policy Workshop will also give important information
      about the different countries' status. The perspectives for
      FP7 in each country will also be documented.

      • 14:00
        Summary of NGI questionnaire responses 30m
        This slot will present the summary of the questionnaire responses received so far, collecting all national responses in one presentation. This will act as input to stimulate the discussion to follow. The final findings will be documented in an EGEE deliverable scheduled for November.
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Discussion on the questionnaire responses 30m
        This session will highlight possible areas of convergence and divergence and feed the discussion of the next slot, which concerns the next steps to be taken.
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Discussion on the next steps - Towards a European Grid Initiative 30m
        This will be an open discussion on the next steps on the path towards a European Grid Initiative. Forming an Association of NGIs or an Association for the promotion of NGIs will be discussed. Note that a next workshop on EGI will be organised at the end of this year or the beginning of next year.
        Slides
    • 14:00 19:30
      Poster session
      Convener: Massimo Lamanna (CERN)
      • 14:00
        A fully gLite metadata approach to access files for bioinformatics applications 20m
        In the context of bioinformatics laboratory research, measurements from experiments can range dramatically in their accuracy and reproducibility, forcing researchers to design experiments with more biological replicates. However, statistical processing systems can overcome this problem by widening the amount of data they are able to consider, but cost remains a strong limit on the size of experiments. As a more general solution, similar data may be collected across several acquisition facilities, but, in order to be able to reproduce or compare different experimental setups, side conditions associated to experiments must be accurately tracked. Moreover, end-users may be provided with different analysis algorithms by different providers, and search tools may be needed to find data and applications. Eventually, data or experimental setups as well as results from experiments should be collected through a user-friendly web interface. Starting from these considerations, we decided to implement a Grid-based data storage and management system for data concerning bioinformatics experiments. Indeed, a Grid service based approach may provide a shared, standardized and reliable solution for storage and analysis of the above mentioned biological data. Moreover, a Grid portal may allow unpractised users to store their experimental data on a complex storage system and to access distributed data and services. Instead of developing a database, data and experiment annotations can be stored using metadata management tools, providing high flexibility and assuring experiment replication for biological research activities. Security and privacy issues can be addressed using a certificate-based authentication schema coming out for free from the Grid technology and sensible data can be federated or accessed without moving them or via volatile copies. The described environment relies on storage services (with replication and catalog services) provided by the gLite Grid middleware. Through the AMGA metadata catalog, gLite is able to exploit the added value of metadata, in order to let users better classify and search experiments. The key feature in our solution is that data files can be searched and accessed just by providing their description metadata. Several keywords (metadata fields) are associated to data files and the metadata catalog collects such high level descriptions. Files are physically stored on the Grid, and the metadata catalog has also the information for accessing them, through their logical file name, without taking care of filesystem structures. This way, files could be replicated on disks to achieve more reliability but the file collection is kept consistent. From a functional point of view, the adopted framework is deployed in the form of a Web Grid application visible to users as traditional web pages, but it is ready to be deployed also as a grid service exposed to the public with standard interface (WSDL). A Web interface has been implemented in order to hide the complexity of framework and to make users able to use a standard browser for navigating a Grid portal and for accessing available data services. From a data point of view, the proposed environment permits users to upload/download their data and results on/from the Grid Portal and to store them on Grid storage resources. The filesystem complexity is hidden by the AMGA representation, thus allowing also a multiple perspective access to data collections. The same framework can be adopted in a biomedical scenario combining text data for patients, studies, and reports, as well as medical imaging acquisition volumes, and time series signals or genomic information.
        Speaker: Dr Ivan Porro (Department of Communication, Computer and System Sciences (DIST), University of Genoa)
      • 14:00
        A Novel Security Approach on Open Grid Service to Validate Certificate by using XACML 10m
        A computational grid is a hardware and software infrastructure capable of providing dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high- end computational resource. There are many ways to access the resources of a computational grid, each with unique security requirements and implications for both the resource user and the resource provider. Current Grid security Infrastructure using PKI based on SSO. But open grid service Security Infrastructure in Global Grid Forum (GGF) will extend use of grid system or services up to business area using XML web services security technology. This paper describes a novel security approach on open grid service to validate certificate based on current globus toolkit environment using XKMS(XML Key Management Specification) and SAML(Security Assertion Markup Language), XACML(extensible Access Control Markup Language) in XML security.
        Speaker: Mr Indrajit Indrajit Sahoo (B.Tech,SASTRA Deemed University,India)
      • 14:00
        A VO-oriented AAA framework 20m
        An integrated framework, based on EGEE tools, providing respectively a credential authority (VOMS), a policy-based authorization system (G-PBox) and an accounting system (DGAS). This framework enables VO/experiment to build groups of users, assign roles and associate policies and quotas to each group and role in a dynamic way, implementing an automatic way to enforce agreements with the resource owners.
        Speaker: Dr Andrea Ferraro (INFN CNAF)
      • 14:00
        AssessGrid - Advanced Risk Assessment and Management for Trustable Grids 20m
        Grid technologies have reached a high level of development, but adopters underline core shortcomings related to security, trustiness, and dependability of the Grid for commercial applications and services. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) should be used to define the quality of service for a job execution. However, providers are still cautious on adoption as agreeing on SLAs including penalty fees is a business risk: system failure, operator unavailability etc. can lead to an SLA violation. AssessGrid will address the risk awareness and consideration in SLA negotiation, self-organising fault-tolerant actions, and capacity planning. Risk assessment methods will serve providers as decision support for accepting/rejecting SLAs, for price/penalty negotiation, for activating fault-tolerance actions, and for capacity and service planning. A confidence service will be developed in AssessGrid for supporting customers in the estimation of provider’s reliability. The AssessGrid results will support all Grid actors by increasing the transparency, reliability, and trustworthiness as well as providing an objective foundation for planning and management of Grid activities.
        Speaker: Dr Felix Heine (Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, University of Paderborn, Germany)
      • 14:00
        Building gLite based scalable Grid environment with HP SFS 20m
        In BME we have assembled a site consisting of a Grid Gate (GG), a Storage Element (SE) and over thirty Working Nodes (WN). The GG and SE as well as many of the WNs are HP ProLiant G2 servers with two Intel Xeon 3.00GHz processors and 2GB RAM. In most cases it is very difficult to maintain and administer such sites. Expanding these with new nodes is a time-consuming task that requires extraordinary attendance. We have created an NFS based solution, which allows nodes to be added in a matter of minutes without prior installation of gLite software. The worker nodes are nearly diskless: most part of the file system on each is served via NFS root located on the GG host. This supplies all the necessary applications and configuration files to operate in the Grid environment. Only temporary data files and the host-specific private keys and certificates are stored locally. The latter two are required by the PKI based authentication mechanism that is commonly used in Grids such as the EGEE Grid. It is also possible to deploy completely diskless nodes where these are downloaded from a secure network. The hosts may contain large capacity disks, which can be used not only for temporary storage for the worker nodes, but as a storage disk in a Disk Pool Manager (DPM) architecture. The operating system is still served by NFS or another possibility is to download a complete file system image to a local hard disk. With this realization we have created an easily manageable site. The hosts are connected with a Gigabit Ethernet network, which also connects them to an HP Scalable File Share (SFS) storage system of approximately 3 Terabytes capacity. To make both the GG and SE accessible from outside, each of them has another network interface which connects it to the Internet. The site is part of the EGEE infrastructure, and hence runs the gLite middleware. We have also established a Virtual Organization called “egeebme” and a local Certificate Authority for testing and educational purpose. This allows students and researchers to become acquainted with gLite without applying for a globally accepted certificate and VO membership. The homogeneous set of the HP servers makes it possible to use one common kernel image on each host without further configuration on the hosts separately. Inserting another identical HP ProLiant G2 server needs no special action. For other hardware configurations, only a different type of kernel image is required, but the same NFS root can be used. User authentication on the site is provided by Kerberos and LDAP running on the GG machine. The system on the SE contains the client tools for the HP SFS and is configured to make the storage space available to the Grid infrastructure. The SFS is based on the Lustre File System, and provides an efficient administration environment and a single point of management. The flexible Lustre technology permits a huge variety of configurations. Meta-data and object data is stored on different disks, providing separate scalability for both. This allows grid administrators to fine tune the system to meet the specific needs of the different types of applications. Files are stored on Object Storage Targets (OST) and administrative data is handled by the meta-data Server (MDS). File-data can be striped across multiple OSTs; allowing extreme file sizes and multiplying file I/O performance. SFS provides a network-independent solution with high network performance, redundancy, higher availability and transaction rates than the standard solutions, also offering compatibility between different types of distributions and architectures. It can be reached through the conventional standard network file systems. Network bandwidth and latency is improving rapidly, which obsoletes current storage technologies. HP SFS therefore supports the most recent types of network systems as interconnect. Gigabit Ethernet is only the slowest possibility, but InfiniBand or Myrinet can provide 770 Mbyte/s network performance. Robust computing nodes require an effective and reliable access to the main file system. While using NFS, we have been experiencing file I/O malfunctions, so we have been looking for a more sophisticated solution. By upgrading from NFS to SFS based centralized file systems random failures and network dropouts can be eliminated. In addition to being part of the European Grid, the site serves as a computing cluster for the computations at BME Faculty of Architecture. The problem being solved is calculating the prestressing strength of reinforced concrete bars used in bridges. This can be modeled as a Boundary Value Problem (BVP) that is easy to parallelize by parameter sweeping, i.e. dividing the parameter domain into smaller subdomains each node can work on separately.
        Speaker: Mr Péter Dóbé (BME)
      • 14:00
        Cardiology Services and the EGEE Grid 20m
        Cardiology Services involve multiple Specialist Medical Disciplines and a wide variety of related procedures. Some Services must be provided locally, e.g., invasive, while others can be provided remotely, e.g., most non-invasive can be provided in part remotely. All such Services are key elements in medical diagnoses and procedures associated with the Heart and Cardiovascular System. In modern Medical Practice each Service is infused with an Information Technology component, required by Law or Practice. Internet-based Services have been developed to assist Researchers, Practitioners and Patients. The Nurse-ECG Internet Service is presented. Its User Community includes Researchers, Practitioners and Patients. The major limitation is geographic. The Value-Added by such systems increases substantially when support and accesibility is available globally on a 24/7 basis. The EGEE Grid offers such a pathway and potential growth. Basic requirements for a global Nurse-ECG System are presented. They are heavily influenced by the demonstrated need for real-time interpersonal communications and Electronic Healthcare Records for all members of the User Community.
        Speaker: Dr Thomas Clark (Complete Cardiology Services Ltd)
      • 14:00
        Computational Chemistry Achievements within VOCE Environment 10m
        This contribution describes accomplishments achieved by the computational chemistry community utilizing computational resources and corresponding applications within a grid environment of the Virtual Organization for Central Europe (VOCE). VOCE infrastructure, part of the EGEE II Grid, currently consists of computational resources and storage capacities provided by the Central European resource owners. VOCE currently provides a complete grid infrastructure running all necessary grid services helping thus scientists to solve their research projects and problems. One of the currently intensively studied areas of modern material design and drug discovery is chemistry of interlocked supramolecules and their mutual interactions. In the presented work, we investigate rotaxane, a supramolecular complex. Rotaxanes are interlocked molecules in which macrocycle (the 'wheel') is threaded by a long 'axle' component. Our system consists of a molecule cucurbit[7]uril (CB7) and a 4,4'-bipyridinium derivate. Experiments show a switch-like movements along the axle in this supramolecular complex. To give a detailed insight to the switch-mechanism we calculated the free energy profile along reaction coordinate related to this movement. The evaluation of the free energy is a computationally demanding task requiring extensive computational resources due to necessity to properly sample large phase-space. Currently used methods for the free energy estimations (such as umbrella, bluemoon or adaptive biassing force method) require a calculation of a huge amount of middle-length molecular dynamic simulations which can run independently in parallel. Therefore, these types of computational tasks are very well suited to exploit large grid environments like the VOCE. The complete solving of the described research problem comprises approximately hundreds thousands of CPU hours at 1.6 GHz CPU with 1 GB RAM. Our results clearly demonstrate that the VOCE Grid is the place where challenging applications requiring advanced computational chemistry techniques can be easily utilized and corresponding research problems successfully solved.
        Speaker: Martin Petrek (CESNET)
      • 14:00
        CRAB a user-friendly tool to perform CMS analysis in grid environment. 20m
        During september 2007 the LHC accelerator will start its activity. CMS, one of the four LHC experiment, will produce a large amount of data that should be stored and analyzed. The CMS computing model is based on the grid paradigm: data are spread and accessed on a number of geographically distributed computing centers. Until real data are not available, the CMS community needs simulated data to study the detector response, the forseen physics interaction and to get experience with management and analysis data. So a large number of simulated data are produced and distributed among computing centres. Real data will be analyzed by physicist at an expected rate of ~100000 jobs per day using the grid infrastructure. To reach this analysis goals, CMS is developig CRAB (Cms Remote Analysis Builder), a user friendly tool to allow a generic users without knowledge of grid infrastructure to access data and perform its analysis as simply as in a local environment. CRAB is deployed by CMS to access remote data and it takes care to interact with all Data Management services, from data discovery and location to output file management. An overview of the current implementation of this tool, its interaction with grid middleware and its usage is presented in this work.
        Speaker: Federica Fanzago (INFN-PD)
      • 14:00
        ELFI: EGRID LCG Filesystem Interface 20m
        ELFI is a filesystem interface to the LFC catalog and LCG/EGEE SE (both classic and SRM v2). With ELFI, you can see the entries in the LFC catalog as files in a locally-mounted filesystem, and directly operate on the replica contents: read/write operations on the local filesystem are acted as read/write operations on a remote SE via the GSI-RFIO protocol. All operations on the catalog or the SE have a local filesystem equivalent. ELFI features: * Transparent file access via LFN only * Posix ACL support * Posix IO operations (throug gsi-rfio transport protocol) * Classic SE, SRM v2.1.1 and SRM v2.2 support * replica management via filesystem commands (``ln'' command) The ELFI filesystem process runs entirely in user-space: it uses the standard FUSE (http://fuse.sf.net) userland filesystem framework.
        Speaker: Dr Antonio Messina (ICTP Trieste)
      • 14:00
        Execution of windows binaries in gLite 20m
        The main goal of the project is to extend gLite to Microsoft Compute Cluster Server (CCS) platform, with the first phase to make CCS as the work node of gLite infrastructure.. Heterogeneity is the beauty of Grid, but still a milestone to reach. To integrate the large population of Windows-based resources into the Grid world through Grid services is also essential to acquire more momentum from the industry and from the grass-roots. In general, we successfully make CCS nodes running jobs from gLite resource broker and Windows jobs are able to execute natively under the control of gLite as well. The main challenges of this project stem from the essence of Unix and Windows. For example, gLIte makes use of plenty of shell scripts for wrapping end users’ job descriptions to meet the target environment and get dispatched and executed on the fly, but we are short of such flexible tools in Windows. Job profiles have to be re-compiled for Windows. For the bridge of gLite and CCS, we take advantage of gLite CE’s BLAHP interface, an abstract layer for underlying queuing systems.A set of API and tools were developed upon BLAHP to let jobs submitted from each side. . Job submission approach is persistent as the gLite way entirely. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our works, BLAST and virtual screening applications were ported and tested with success. In the future, we plan to have the proxy delegation to Windows nodes, GSI-based data transmission in Windows, and the fully compatible storage element could be developed in the next phase.
        Speaker: Mr Shih-Chun Chiu (ASGC, Taiwan)
      • 14:00
        Fusion_RDIG applications 10m
        There are three main nuclear fusion applications to run on Russian Data Intensive Grid infrastructure at this moment and in the nearest future: 1. Plasma devices (stellarator) numerical optimisation; 2. ITER facility engeenering computations: propagation of waves in different plasmas; 3. Simulation and data processing for finding reduced models suitable for plasma real-time control. The first application was presented on the 1st EGEE Users Forum. The presented genetic optimisation method have proved it's effectiveness in grid environments. Thus, a lot of optimisation tasks from a variety of scientific and engeneering areas may be solved the same way. The software elaborated for this application should be refactored to be more user frendly and robust. The second and the third applications are in the process of porting into the grid environment. The ports should demonstrate a grid effectiveness in the two cases: - large engineering variation computations; - natural science data mining for construction of phenomenological models. The first applications' grid runs are expected to be carried out until the end of 2006.
        Speaker: Mr Vladimir Voznesensky (Nuclear Fusion Inst., RRC "Kurchatov Inst.")
      • 14:00
        g-Eclipse - a integrated workbench for Grid users, Grid operators and Grid developers based on the Eclipse plattform 10m
        The simplification of the access to powerful Grid infrastructures with the help of an integrated Grid workbench tool is the goal of the g- Eclipse project. The project started on July 1, 2006 and is partially funded by the European Commission. The integrated Grid environment will address all needs of possible Grid activities and Grid actors. The current lack of an uniform Grid workbench toolbox, which will be an entry point to the Grid resources, will be removed with the g-Eclipse framework. The project plans to deliver the future workbench, bringing together new users, applications and Grid resource providers. The main goal for g-Eclipse project is to prepare integrated Grid environment for all grid activities. The idea is, that the same toolbox can be use for utilizing grids in applications, for operating and managing the grid infrastructure, and for developing grid applications. g-Eclipse will be based on Eclipse, probably the most successful IDEs nowadays. Eclipse was developed by IBM in 2001 and then turned to the nonprofit Eclipse Foundation (www.eclipse.org), to be managed as an open-source platform.The architecture of the g-Eclipse framework will be made for reuse and extension to allow for easy adaptation by new Grid applications. The g-Eclipse project will address three major groups in the Grid domain: Grid users will benefit from the Windows-like access to Grid resources; Grid operators and resource providers will be able to reduce the time-to-service by the Grid management and Grid site configuration tools; and Grid application developers will reduce the time-to-market for new Grid applications by accelerating the development and deployment cycle. The g-Eclipse project aims for general support for different Gird middleware systems, but in the first year the g-Eclipse framework will include exemplary support for the gLite middleware. The project itself, the main ideas and the requirements to an EGEE infrastructure will be presented. First integrated tools as prototypes will be presented. The poster should help to get in touch with potential users of the framework, the gLite middleware developers as well as with other applications developers.
        Speaker: Dr Harald Kornmayer (FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM KARLSRUHE (FZK))
      • 14:00
        GENIUS Portal and EnginFrame FrameWork: new features and future perspectives 20m
        GENIUS is a powerful Grid Portal jointly developed by INFN and NICE srl within the INFN Grid Project . It provides to end users secure, uniform, pervasive and ubiquitous access to distributed, high-end computational resources, services and applications through a standard Web browser or through a flexible Web Services interface. EnginFrame and GENIUS greatly simplify the use of Grid-enabled applications and services, so they have been adopted by several important industrial companies all over the world and by many leading research & educational institutes. In particular GENIUS has been installed in many EGEE sites, with satisfaction of users and site managers and has been a core technology in the context of the GILDA dissemination testbed. GENIUS allows to expose gLite-enabled applications via Web-browser or Web Services and, using different EGEE services, provides the users with a wide range of facilities to run jobs and to manage their own data in a very simple way. Based on the latest version of the EnginFrame framework by Nice srl, the GENIUS Portal can run services on a broad range of different computational systems including gLite, Platform LSF, Sun Grid Engine, Altair PBS, Globus, etc. It supports several open and vendor neutral standards and seamlessly integrates with JSR168 compliant enterprise portals, distributed file systems, GUI virtualization tools and different kinds of authentication systems including Globus GSI, MyProxy, VOMS extensions and a wide range of enterprise solutions. Thanks to work done during the last year, GENIUS fully supports the latest release of the gLite middleware. In particular it now allows to submit and manage jobs in queues, supporting different flavours like DAGs, Job Collections and, in the next future, Parametric Jobs. It also provides data management functionalities towards LFC Catalog and supports AMGA client integration. Looking at the future of GENIUS, many important features are under analysis and evaluation. Interoperability among different flavours of Grid middleware is one of the most important challenges GENIUS/EnginFrame is going to face. In particular, in the context of the A-WARE European project, a common interface will be provided to access gLite, Unicore/GS (DEISA project) and GT4 (TeraGrid project). Moreover the main goal of the A-WARE project is to develop and integrate services at a higher level in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) context providing workflow orchestrations and workflow design capabilities, hiding the underlying complexity of atomic job submissions to end users.
        Speaker: Mr Maurizio Melato (NICE srl)
      • 14:00
        Grid and Agents: a Unified Approach 20m
        With Grid technologies and software agents becoming increasingly relevant in the sphere of distributed systems, it is suggested by many that these two technologies, far from being contradictory, serve an important complementary function. Grid technologies focus on a robust and extensible infrastructure. Agent systems concentrate on autonomous and flexible behaviours. Both would benefit from utilising the relative strengths of the other. Motivated by this desire, we review the current state of the art of both areas, review the challenges that both communities face and examine current attempts to develop an integrated strategy that promises an enhanced symbiosis between the two approaches. We propose an approach to a unified Grid/agent framework that has the ability to support the development of distributed systems that would, at the same time, be robust, extensible, autonomous and flexible.
        Speaker: Mr Lee Mathew (University of Greenwich)
      • 14:00
        Grid-enabled SEE++, A Grid-Based Medical Decision Support System for Eye Muscle Surgery 20m
        JKU/RISC currently develops in cooperation with Upper Austrian Research (UAR) the SEE-GRID software system. SEE-GRID is based on the SEE++ software for the biomechanical 3D simulation of the human eye and its muscles. SEE++ simulates the common eye muscle surgery techniques in a graphic interactive way that is familiar to an experienced surgeon. SEE++ is world-wide the most advanced software for this purpose; it is used by various hospitals and medical doctors for surgery training and planning, SEE++ deals with the support of diagnosis and treatment of strabismus, which is the common name given to usually persistent or regularly occuring misalignment of the eyes. Strabismus is a visual defect in which eyes point in different directions. A person suffering from it may see double images due to misaligned eyes. SEE++ is able to simulate the result of the Hess-Lancaster test, from which the pathological reason of strabismus can be estimated. The outcome of such an examination is two gaze patterns of blue points and of red points respectively. The blue points represent the image seen by one eye and the red pointsthe image seen by the simulated other eye, but in a pathological situation there is a deviation between the blue and the red points. In SEE++, a third gaze pattern, a measured one (with green points) of a patient can be given as input. In this case, SEE++ takes some default or estimated eye data and modifies a subset of them until the calculated gaze pattern of the simulated eye (red points) matches the measured gaze pattern. This procedure is called pathology fitting. The current algorithm is time consuming and gives only a more or less precise estimation for the pathology of the patient. Doctors want to see quickly the results from such a decision support system, but for reaching adequate response times it is not sufficient to use only local computational power. The goal of SEE-GRID is to adapt and to extend SEE++ in several steps and to develop an efficient grid-based tool for Evidence Based Medicine, which supports the surgeons to choose the best surgery techniques in case of the treatments of different syndromes of strabismus. We approach this goal in three phases: - We have implemented a parallel and grid-enabled version of the Hess-Lancaster test simulation (it is based on the Globus Toolkit at present). - We are currently developing a grid-based medical database described for storing and sorting patient data with gaze patterns and eye data. - We plan to make a gLite compatible version of SEE-GRID and then further develop it on the basis of the higher services of the EGEE-II middleware (comparedwith the low-level services of the Globus Toolkit). - We will work on a parallel grid-enabled pathology fitter algorithm. References: 1. Károly Bósa, Wolfgang Schreiner, Michael Buchberger, Thomas Kaltofen, SEE-GRID, A Grid-Based Medical Decision Support System for Eye Muscle Surgery. 1st Austrian Grid Symposium, December 1-2, 2005, Hagenberg, Austria. OCG Verlag, 14 pages. http://www.risc.uni-linz.ac.at/people/kbosa/papers/1st_AGRID_Symp_Proceedings2006.pdf 2. SEE-GRID Technical report page: http://www.risc.uni-linz.ac.at/research/parallel/projects/agrid/results/
        Speaker: Dr Bosa Karoly Jozsef (JKU/RISC)
      • 14:00
        ICGrid: Intensive Care Grid 20m
        Intensive Care Units (ICUs) at hospitals utilize cutting edge technology in order to acquire the physiological state of inpatients at an extremely high fidelity. Such measurements can then be utilized for i) education, ii) early diagnosis and iii) for defining early warning systems that identify when a human life is jeopardy. A problem with the current setting is that individual ICUs are limited to the locally acquired measurements. As a result, the number of clinically "interesting" episodes available to doctors is also very limited. The ICGrid (Intensive Care Grid), is a platform that will enable the seamless integration the physiological parameters acquired at ICUs scattered around Europe. Such a task requires huge processing and data storage capabilities, which are common attributes of the EGEE GRID infrastructure. ICGrid is based on a hybrid architecture that combines i) a heterogenous set of monitors that sense the in-patients and ii) EGEE GRID technology that enables the storage, processing and information sharing task between Intensive Care Units.
        Speaker: Dr Marios Dikaiakos (Dept. of Computer Science, University of Cyprus)
      • 14:00
        IMRT Planning and Verification on EGEE 20m
        the eIMRT project is currently carried out by diverse institutions in Galicia (Spain) and the USA. The eIMRT project will make available a set of algorithms to optimize and validate radiotherapy treatments to the radiotherapists, both CRT- and IMRT-based, hiding the complexity of the computer infrastructure needed to solve the problem using GRID technologies. The new platform is designed to be independent of the medical accelerator models, scalable and open. Having a web portal as client, it is designed in three layers using web services which will allow users to access it directly from any kind of front-ends and clients. It has three main components, namely remote characterization of linear accelerators for Monte Carlo and convolution/superposition (C/S) dose- calculation techniques, remote Grid-enabled radiotherapy treatment planning optimization and verification and data depository.
        Speaker: Dr Javier López (Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia)
      • 14:00
        Initial experience with Tycoon, a new approach to resource allocation 10m
        The variety of EGEE applications come up with many different requirements. For example, biomedical and generic virtual organizations (VOs) run jobs for five minutes, whereas high energy physics (HEP) jobs can run for days. Some mechanisms have been investigated to make this cohabitation satisfactory in leveraging theories from economics. Additionally, thanks to virtualization, it is now possible to make the allocation as dynamic as electric power supplies, and to implement schemes that lead to an optimal resource utility. Such a system has been implemented in HP Labs and tested in CERN openlab. An interesting approach in the future would be to have our grid infrastructure benefit from it without losing the capabilities of current allocation architecture and strategies, like static contracts between VOs and service-level agreements. If successful, such an integration could also be an early step towards organizing grid self-sustainability.
        Speaker: Grehant Xavier (CERN openlab / HP)
      • 14:00
        Job reliability 20m
        Errors are always frustrating. They are even more frustrating when their cause is not clear. And the GRID is not an exception. For example, submitting a job to the GRID and getting back an error is frustrating. Not knowing if the error was due to something you did, some middleware glitch or a site problem makes it even worse. Our goal was to tackle this problem. In order to do that, the first thing is to understand the different error messages reported back to the users. We went through the most common error messages: first, investigating the underlying problems; then categorizing, and if possible, helping the responsible to fix it; and finally monitoring if that error message disappeared. One common reason for job failures is site misconfiguration. Being able to detect such a misconfiguration as soon as possible helps in several ways: first of all, it minimizes the time that it takes to bring the site back to a normal state; moreover, debugging it is easier, since the problem happened in the recent past. In the next chapters we will describe in more detail the study that we did for some of the error messages. We will also describe the tools that we created to monitor the site efficiency.
        Speaker: Pablo Saiz (CERN)
      • 14:00
        LcgCAF: CDF submission portal to LCG resources 20m
        The CDF Collaboration is moving beyond the used dedicated resources and starts exploiting Grid resources due to the large increases in computing requirements. CDF has been running a set of CDF Analysis Farm (CAFs), which are submission portals to dedicated pools, and LcgCAF is basically a reimplementation of the CAF model in order to access Grid resources by using the LCG/EGEE Middleware components. LcgCAF is constituted by a set of services each of them responsible for accepting, submitting and monitoring CDF user jobs during theirs lifetimes in the Grid environment. This poster presents an overview the LcgCAF architecture within the LCG/EGEE Middleware. The performances on Monte Carlo production using this portal are also shown together with future improvements.
        Speaker: Dr Donatella Lucchesi (Departement of Physics, University and INFN of Padova, Italy)
      • 14:00
        LiveWN, CPU Scavenging in the Grid Era: Expanding EGEE Infrastructure to the Millions 20m
        The project’s goal is to introduce an easy and versatile way to provide and use Grid resources, acting both as a Worker Node and User Interface, without the need of any operating system installation or middleware configuration on users' machines. At the same time it provides an excellent training tool for new Grid users and novices that want to experiment, without requiring installation. It has been tested thoroughly under different circumstances with success. LiveWN works in the form of a LiveCD or memory stick under a virtual machine within many popular host operating systems.
        Speakers: Mr Fotis Georgatos (GRNET), Mr Giannis Kouretis (NTUA)
      • 14:00
        Mathcell.Ru: Integrated Mathematical Model of Living Cell in GRID 20m
        Mathematical modeling of a living cell is a great challenge for modern science. The creation of integrated model of eukaryotic cell is the aim of the Mathematical Cell (MathCell) project (http://www.mathcell.ru) realized at the Institute of Mathematical Problems of Biology RAS during the EGEE Project. It includes 3D interactive living cell model, encyclopedia on mathematical modeling of cell and software for modeling of basic processes in living cell. Within the limits of the Project the interactive environment was developed, which allows to perform calculations of some mathematical models in GRID infrastructure. Further development of the MathCell project implies integration of individual components of the model into a program system which would simulate cell processes at different levels – from microscopic to macroscopic scales and from picoseconds to the cell lifetimes. Such modeling will allow ones to solve a number of practical problems, for example, acceleration of development of novel drugs and of prediction of their direct and mediated action, development of thin biochemical agents which will influence on metabolic reactions in the organism. Besides such model will be useful by development various nanostructures and nanomaterials - in the most advanced researches which are having for an object creation nanorobots which at a cellular level will work with a view of medicine and preventive maintenance of illnesses. This work will naturally require combining of resources provided by EGEE-II Project and their merging into an integrated computational environment.
        Speaker: Dr Nafisa Nazipova (Institute of Mathematical Problems of Biology RAS (IMPB RAS))
      • 14:00
        MediGRID - Medical Grid Computing 20m
        MediGRID - Medical Grid Computing Sax U1, Viezens F1, Mohammed Y1, Lingner Th2, Morgenstern B2, Vossberg M3, Krefting, D3, Rienhoff O1 1Department of Medical Informatics, University of Göttingen, Germany 2Department of Bioinformatics, University of Göttingen, Germany 3Department of Medical Informatics, Charité, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany fred.viezens@med.uni-goettingen.de Introduction The project MediGRID [1] combines research institutes from various areas of Medicine, Biomedical Informatics, and other Life Sciences. Numerous associated partners from industry, healthcare and scientific institutions ensure a broad representation of this large community. The main goal of MediGRID is the development of a grid-middleware-platform with Globus Toolkit 4 as a basis for eScience Services for the community and to help researchers to use these services. Here we present the first results of the projects consisting of the infrastructure, first community applications and basic privacy rules. Materials and Methods Concerning the data flow in grids, most projects are similar in the lower layers (s. Fig. 1), but the biomedical community has to face particular challenges in the upper layers. The top layer represents the heterogeneous biomedical data sources. Beyond the problem to find the relevant data sets via metadata description, access control to the data is of paramount importance, as the owner of the data are foremost the patients. Due to the heterogeneity of the data we need an additional ontology layer to homogenize the data. Given semantic interoperability the researcher can correlate and analyze the data with biomedical informatics methods. Biomedical data in medical grids are heterogeneous, contain different kinds of information and have different levels of privacy. The data might include information about [2]: • Population: Epidemiology • Diseases: Clinical practice, clinical trials • Patient data: Health record, clinical history, physical exams, lab/imaging studies • Organ/tissue: pathology • Cellular: histology • Molecular: genetic test results and genomic data. Having these data online with the suitable tools to connect, combine and analyze creates new challenges for data protection and privacy. Results The current privacy concepts do not cover the aspects and abilities of grid computing. Especially the re-identification risk with the combination of different data types has to be assessed. There are severe privacy concerns related to genomic-wide association studies [3-5]. These are the main reasons for the development of an enhanced security concept for MediGRID. Four methodological modules are responsible to construct the suitable infrastructure: ontology, resource fusion, middleware and eScience. On the other hand, three research modules take the initiative to use this national grid infrastructure to assist their work: biomedical Informatics, image processing and clinical research. The MediGRID consortium developed a middleware component as a connector for the medical community to resources of the integration project in D-Grid [6]. The community modules use this middleware to “gridify” their applications in order to show the advantage of grid computing in medicine. Ontology Using OGSA-DAI as a standard of Data Access and Integration in grids, the ontology module has successfully developed an ontology tool and implemented it as a first step to be a Gridsphere-Portlet in the MediGRID portal being available for all project partners. Bioinformatics Dialign is a widely used software tool for multiple alignments of nucleic acid and protein sequences. Within the MediGRID portal a parallelized version of the software is used to speed up the computationally expensive procedure. In that way distributed computing allows the user to obtain high-quality alignments of bigger databases and longer sequences. AUGUSTUS is a program that predicts gene structures in eukaryotic genomic sequences with high accuracy. Since AUGUSTUS performs a successive analysis of overlapping sequence sections, it is easy to parallelize. Therefore users benefit from distributed computing with several instances of the program. Grid resources also allow frequent update and centralized storage of huge EST databases. Image Processing A 3D image reconstruction for prostate biopsy will register the different ultrasonic scans helping the physician to have a new viewing of the prostate that was not possible using the traditional 2D methods. The virtual vascular surgery helps to calculate and present the animated 3D blood flow field in the brain vessels, which could be used to anticipate the pressure on the walls of the vessels and for example to predict a bleeding risk. The Brain 4D MRI image processing application in MediGRID assists the identification of the brain areas research. All three applications are demanding the possibility of massive data volume storage and processing. Because of the constant increase of the data volume coherent with the development in the imaging techniques, a dynamic extendable computing and storage infrastructure is needed, which ideally will be a grid environment. Privacy In the first step we are working with non person-related data and set up the first generation of privacy rules. As a preparation for the next phase – dealing with person related data – we defined the additionally necessary advanced security methods like audit and tracking. Furthermore some legal issues concerning virtual organizations and the ownership of data and material have to be addressed. Further perspective As we gained experience with our first medical grid applications, we will be able to “gridify” other community applications more easily. The initial incarnation of the infrastructure is set up; some details are still to come. As genotyping constantly gets cheaper, many formerly phenome-related projects around complex diseases consider genotyping within the next couple of years. Beyond the indisputable opportunities of these studies there are quite some challenges to be faced. MediGRID addresses issues like the homogenization of heterogeneous data sources and how do we deal with the well-known privacy problems. Solving those issues will enhance the portability of life science grid services to other projects and other communities. References 1 www.medigrid.de 2 Martin-Sanchez, F., V. Maojo, and G. Lopez-Campos, Integrating genomics into health information systems. Methods Inf Med, 2002. 41(1): p. 25-30. 3 Butte, A.J. and I.S. Kohane, Creation and implications of a phenome-genome network. Nat Biotechnol, 2006. 24(1): p. 55-62. 4 Lin, Z., A.B. Owen, and R.B. Altman, Genetics. Genomic research and human subject privacy. Science, 2004. 305(5681): p. 183. 5 Kohane, I.S. and Altman R.B., Health-Information Altruists — A Potentially Critical Resource. NEJM, 2005. 353 (19): p. 2074-2077 6 www.d-grid.de This work was supported by the D-Grid Project MediGRID, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), FKZ 01AK803A-H.
        Speaker: Mr Yassene Mohammed (MediGRID)
        Paper
        Poster
      • 14:00
        Molecular Dynamics study of Propane system in a Egee Grid parallel platform 20m
        The increasing availability of computer power on distributed platforms makes it easier to perform molecular based simulations of complex systems in order to reproduce their macroscopic properties. In this report we outline the work carried out in our laboratory by performing a molecular dynamics simulation of the Propane bulk system in liquid and gas phase. The calculations were aimed at estimating in an a priori fashion some thermodynamics properties of the system and to build the related phase diagram [1]. To this end the DL_POLY [2] software package was used for the npt statistical ensamble at different temperatures. Computational tasks were distributed using the EGEE-Grid platform [3]. To obtain preliminary indications on the performance of the used platform, a test case was run on six different EGEE-Grid clusters. In order to evaluate the elapsed time of each simulation and the related speed-up for each cluster, we ran the calculations sequentially on one node and in parallel on 2 and 4 nodes. Measured elapsed times and speedups will be illustrated at the meeting. The parallel performance of some clusters of the EGEE-Grid is very close to the ideal value due to their dedicated usage. Deviations from it occurring in the other clusters are mainly due to the time sharing regime adopted by them. This means that the parallel performances of each EGEE-Grid cluster strictly depend on the adopted regime. In order to evaluate more in detail the parallel performance of each cluser and the waiting time intercurring between the scheduling and the running of a process we restricted parallel calculations to two nodes. To carry out a statistical analysis we ran 50 parallel jobs. As apparent from the table, more than 70% of the jobs ran properly and only 26% was aborted. Abortion is due for 62% to comunications errors between the nodes of the same cluster, for 23% to internal errors of DL POLY occurred during the running and for 15% to the scheduler. The calculated value of the density of the system gets closer to the data given in literature (582 Kg m(E-3) at T=230 K at P=1.013 bar [4]) when going from 200 K to 230 K. At the same time we computed high values of pressure and correlated statistical errors. Possible ways out of this problem can be an increase of the simulation time in order to obtain a better average value of the pressure and/or a small modification of the force field of the system in order to normalize the effect of the pressure on the system. References [1] Costantini, A., Lagana', A., Pirani, F.: Lecture Notes in Computer Sci- ence 3980 (2006) 738-713. [2] Smith, W., Forester, T.R.: DL POLY2: a general-purpose parallel molecular dynamics simulation package. J. Mol. Graph. 14 (3) (1996) 136-141 [3] Storchi, L., Manuali, C., Gervasi, O., Vitillaro, G., Lagan, A., Tarantelli, F.: Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2658 (2003) 297-306. [4] Air liquid group website: http://www.airliquide.com
        Speaker: Dr Alessandro Costantini (University of Perugia)
      • 14:00
        Monitoring and Ranking of Grid Failures using FailRank 20m
        Detecting and managing failures in an automated way is an important step toward the goal of a dependable grid. Currently, this is an extremely complex task that relies on over-provisioning of resources, ad-hoc monitoring and user intervention. We present the FailRank architecture, a simple yet powerful framework for integrating and ranking information sources that characterize failures in a grid system. In the FailRank architecture, feedback sources (e.g. websites, LDAP queries, representative low-level measurements, etc) are continuously coalesced into a representative array of numeric vectors, the FailShot Matrix (FSM). FSM is then continuously ranked using efficient top-k query processing algorithms in order to identify the K sites with the highest potential to feature some failure. This allows system administrators to focus their attention on the sites with the highest potential to run into failures and resource brokers to divert jobs away from the respective sites. We identify challenges and preliminary solutions for a variety of complementary tasks including exploratory data analysis and prediction.
        Speaker: Mr Kyriacos Neocleous (University of Cyprus)
      • 14:00
        Potential of Semantic Web Services in realizing Semantic Grid 20m
        Over the last few years, Grid Computing has adapted to Web Services standards with the emergence of Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF). This alignment with Web Services standards has made the Grid standards more scalable by enabling Grid resources interoperable over the Web. The next step for Grid is Semantic Grid in which knowledge about resources is exposed and handled explicitly. It is envisioned as semantic layering over the current Grid infrastructure. Semantic Web Services technologies can be applied to the Grid in a way to achieve the Semantic Grid vision. For example, the background knowledge and vocabulary of a Grid middleware component could be captured in ontologies. Metadata can be used to label Grid resources and entities with concepts, for example describing a data file in terms of the application domain where it is used. Rules and classification-based reasoning mechanisms could be used to generate new metadata from existing metadata, for example describing the rules for membership of a VO and reasoning that a potential member’s credentials are satisfactory. Moreover, activities like Grid service discovery or negotiation of service level agreements, among others, can be potentially enhanced using the functionalities provided by Semantic Web Service technologies. Started far apart in applications and technology, grid services and web services converged (Grid services started with GT1, web services started with XML, SOAP and WSDL, and finally converged as WSRF, an extension of web services that considers grid specific requirements), but still they are defined at a syntactical level, without any formal semantic that would make the suitable for automation. A technology is needed that will extend and enrich these service descriptions with new elements that will allow to automatize service related tasks. The conceptual model of WSMO, and WSML, the formal language that reflects the conceptual model, will allow different types of automatic proofs to be made in this language, thus providing a certain level of automation for service related tasks. The OGSA framework, the conceptual model for grids, defines different types of services with specific capabilities that are needed for grid applications. However, OGSA doesn’t provide a formal language for describing these services, thus being of little use in automatic performance of different service related tasks. Current languages used in grid, like GRAM (grid resource allocation manager), are based on XML and XML- schema, thus inheriting all its drawbacks (semi structured data format, no formal semantics, no reasoning support, etc); here is where OGSA could benefit from the conceptual model of WSMO and its associated language, WSML. All the OGSA services, which are summarized below could employ WSMO for semantically describing their properties: Infrastructure Services - OGSA leverages Web services architecture to implement a SOA. WSDL is used for service descriptions. SOAP is the communication protocol. Here WSMO/WSMX will be helpful. Initially this infrastructure was based on OGSI but now it will be based on WSRF. WSMO conceptual model can be extended to cope up with complexity of Grid Services. The extended WSMO model for Grid can act as specification to realize Semantic Grid Services. Execution Management Services - These services deal with the problems of task initiation and management. Grid resource broker uses the status information for each resource stored in monitoring and discovery service to discover a resource and initiate a job or set of jobs on that resource. After scheduling jobs, it also gathers information on the status of jobs. With the emergence of Semantic Grid, the information stored by Grid resource broker has to be made semantically annotated which will enable the Semantic Grid infrastructure to manage, monitor and discover the available grid resources automatically, more easily and more precisely. Data Services - Data services in the grid are responsible for efficient data access, data consistency, data persistency, data integration and data location management. Triple Space Computing associated closely with Semantic Web Services can bring next level of advancement in the Data services of gird. Resource Management Services - These services allow the management of individual resource itself, management of resources in Grid (i.e. resource reservation, monitoring and control) and monitoring of Grid infrastructure which consists of resources as well like monitoring the registry service. Semantic annotations to grid services will improve the Resource Management by providing explicit meta- information to describe the resources of Grid. Security Services - Security services provide controlled access to resources which can be in various administrative domains with different access and security policies. Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) specifies the whole set of protocols and security architectures that are required for controlled resource sharing across the Grid. Semantic annotations to Grid resources and other entities will also help the security services to have a clear and unambiguous scenario and to act accordingly for authentication and authorization of the resources. Self-Management Services - Self-management services include SLA, policies and service level manager model. SLA includes business and IT agreements between the provider and user of the service. Policies are used to govern the behavior of an SLM (Service Level Manager) and the manageable resources under its control. Service Level Manager Model provides the interface such that various human operators and SLM can work together without having knowledge about each other built in at design time. Service level agreements (SLAs) are currently being investigated by Semantic Web Services community as well. However, explicit availability of meta information will enable the self management of services more automatic and dynamic. Information Services - Monitoring and Discovery Service in OGSA is an XML database called Xindice that collects information from each of the resource in Grid. It Stores dynamic data for monitoring and discovery. It also acts a registry for grid services. XPath and XQuery languages are used to query data from information service. Semantic annotations to the intermediate information of Grid will make the monitoring and discovery in Grid more precise and accurate in complex and dynamic scenarios. Acknowledgements The work is funded by the FIT-IT (Forschung, Innovation, Technologie - Informationstechnologie) under project GRISINO - Grid semantics and intelligent objects. The authors would like to thank all the people who are involved in GRISINO project and the funding support from Austrian Government.
        Speaker: Mr Omair Shafiq (DERI Innsbruck)
      • 14:00
        Service classes for job submission: a policy based solution 20m
        Current developments in the world of HEP-based grid computing have put an accent on the need to differentiate user jobs on the basis of group/role membership, creating in effect several classes of service, each with its own specific configuration, and the need to have a fair-share mechanism in place to permit a full and fair use of available resources. This poster shows a policy-based solution of this problem, whose main features are a high configurability and the capacity to change mappings between groups and classes on the fly, without requiring a reconfiguration or a stop of the services.
        Speaker: Dr Vincenzo Ciaschini (INFN CNAF)
      • 14:00
        Special Interest Groups - a Grid Service 20m
        The presentation (poster) aims to introduce Special Interest Group (SIG) concept, being developed as an application in BalticGrid project (www.balticgrid.org). SIG is going to be implemented as a public service based on grid technology. The main task of SIG is to enable group-to-group communication of scientists and researchers, having similar or related R&D interests (to create virtual spaces). The functionality of SIG is based on grid computing infrastructure, introducing new possibilities and features to a virtual space. Beside teleconferencing, which is most standard function in such case, other functions may be offered: application- (computing-), resource-, data-, file-, desktop sharing, some others. The software for SIG is based on AccessGrid open source software, with many modifications, adds, additional components for the BalticGrid environment. As a collaboration tool SIG provides participant information, data storage, BalticGrid services, application sessions. Research areas under consideration for SIG to be developed and implemented are: Baltic Sea Eco-System Modelling; Text Annotation Service; Text-to-Speech Service; Stellar Spectra Computation; Atomic and Nuclear Computations; Computational Modelling of heterogeneous Processes.
        Speaker: Dr Algimantas Juozapavicius (associate professor)
      • 14:00
        The AMGA Metadata Service 20m
        We present the AMGA Metadata Catalogue, which was developed as part of the EGEE (Enabling Grids for EsciencE) project's gLite Grid middleware. AMGA provides access to metadata for files stored on the Grid, as well as a simplified general access to relational data stored in database systems. Design and implementation of AMGA was done in close collaboration with the very diverse EGEE user community to make sure all functionality, performance and security requirements were met. In particular, AMGA targets the needs of the High Energy Physics user community to rapidly access very large amounts of metadata as well as the needs for security of the biomedical community. AMGA therefore tightly integrates fine grained Access Control List based security making use of a Virtual Organisation management system. In addition, AMGA offers advanced federation and replication features to increase dependability, performance and data security.
        Speaker: Nuno Santos (CERN)
      • 14:00
        Towards a Grid infrastructure for Services and Intelligent Content Objects 20m
        The Grid has emerged as a technology aiming at enabling resource sharing and coordinated problem solving in dynamic multi-institutional virtual organizations [6], [8]. Grids are used to join various geographically distributed computational and data resources, and deliver these resources to heterogeneous user communities. While the initial research on Grid computing was focused mainly on providing a seamless access to a heterogeneous suite of computational and data resources, current efforts are addressing the provision of a global distributed infrastructure based on service oriented paradigm. More and more grid toolkits are nowadays are following a service oriented approach by exposing and handling resources as services. However a flexible service Grid is not possible without support by semantic technologies which lead to what is know as Semantic Grid. Semantic Grid comes as an extension of current Grid in which information and services are given well-defined meaning [4]. Knowledge about resources is exposed and handled explicitly thus allowing a certain degree of automation in realizing various tasks on the Grid. Furthermore, the information which is going to be manipulated in a service Grid has to be semantically described. This will allow services to better interpret and manipulate the content of the information they are processing. In our ongoing work in GRISINO project [1] - Grid semantics and intelligent objects, we aim of integrating three leading edge technologies which complement each other, for the definition of intelligent and dynamic business and scientific processes: (1) Semantic Web Services (SWS) as the future standard for the declaration of web-based semantic processes, (2) Intelligent content objects as the unit of value which can be manipulated by semantic web services and (3) Grid Computing as a pervasive service distribution infrastructure for a future, ambient intelligence space. Grid computing is a central pillar for our GRISINO platform, providing a computational and organizational infrastructure. It can be seen as the resource backbone of GRISINO platform in terms of computational and storage power. The present abstract summarizes the authors initial ideas on how Grid computing, as one fundamental pillar of GRISINO platform, will be integrated with Semantic Web Services and Intelligent Content Objects in order to provide platform which supports intelligent and dynamic business and scientific processes. The reminder of this abstract is structured as follows. First we describe our initial ideas on how Grid computing and Semantic Grid as its semantic extension could play the role of a hosting infrastructure for Semantic Web Services. Then we point the need of Grid computing as a supporting infrastructure for Intelligent Content Objects and how these technologies could be integrated. Finally we conclude our paper by pointing out the fundamental role of Grid computing as a foundation block of our infrastructure. 1 Grid computing and Semantic Web Services Among the technologies which are nowadays following a service oriented paradigm, Web services and Grid computing have the biggest impact both on academia and industry. A closer look at Web services and Grid computing shows that these two areas have a lot in common. A resource on the Grid can be view as a service. Latest directions in Grid and Web services [3] provide a uni¯ed framework that deals with both Grid and Web services requirements. What is missing is a proper support for machine processable semantics and therefore human intervention is needed to actually discover, combine, and execute services. Semantic Web services promise to solved this problem by providing a fully mechanized web infrastructure for computers interactions [5]. By using semantic technologies the Semantic Grid vision can be achieved. For example, ontologies, which provide machine understandable terminologies, will be used to describe resources and services on the Grid. The Semantic Grid will be a grid of services semantically annotated. Both domain ontologies (e.g. physic, biology ontologies) and infrastructure onotlogies (e.g. virtual organiation ontologies, service ontologies) will be required. They will allow a sertain degree of automation for tasks like Grid service discovery or negotiation of service level agreements. All these tasks can be potentially enhanced using the functionalities provided by SWS technologies. Another possible integration point is around the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) [7]. The OGSA framework, a conceptual model for Grids, defines a set of services which are needed for grid applications. However, OGSA doesnt provide a formal way to describe these services, thus being of little use in automatic performance of different service related tasks. One particular way to realize the (Semantic) Grid vision by integrating support for SWS into current Grid architectures is to semantically enhance current OGSA services, as for example infrastructure, data or information services. Last but not least all domain grid services which will use the Semantic Grid infrastructure will be annotated with semantic descriptions. 2 Grid computing and Intelligent Content Objects Intelligent Content Objects can be seen as semantically described and annotated content. In GRISINO, Intelligent Content Objects will be produced and manipulated on a large scale by applications, agents and services hosted by the GRISINO infrastructure. Given this high scale dimension in terms of computation and storage, Grid computing is a natural choice to follow. Huge amounts of Intelligent Content Objects or KCOs will likely be stored on a special form of grids called Data Grids [2]. They will allow fast storage, indexing and retrieval of content information in a short amount of time. For example an intelligent content object capturing information about a movie can be replicated or transformed using different services. The space needed to store these objects grows along with the number of operations invoked on these objects. Therefor a huge amount of disk space is required which can be hopefully provided by the Data Grid. The huge amount of storage capabilities is not the only aspect where Grid and Semantic Grid technologies could could empower our GRISINO infrastructure. The other huge scale dimension aspect relates to the huge computational capabilities provided by Grid. This integration dimension between Intelligent Content Objects and Grid Commuting will also be investigated in our integration solution. Coming back to our previous example it is likely that an intelligent content object capturing information about a movie will require allot of computational power when processed by services hosted by GRISINO common system infrastructure (e.g. a movie rendering service). Such power could be easily provided by a Computational Grid that exposes computers and computers clusters as a uniform accessible computational platform. 3 Conclusion Finally, we believe that the research in Semantic Web Service provide a solid basis for an integrated service oriented Semantic Grid. Furthermore we believe that the new Semantic Grid infrastructure which will emerge by combining Grid and Semantic Web services will provided a robust and flexible infrastructure for intelligent manipulation of information content. Our work on the integration aspects mentioned above has just started. We plan to further investigate the integration points previously mentioned and to prove our ideas by developing an experimental testbed - the GRISINO platform. 4 Acknowledgements The work is funded by the FIT-IT (Forschung, Innovation, Technologie - Infor- mationstechnologie) under the project GRISINO - Grid semantics and intelligent objects. The authors would like to thank all the people who are involved in GRISINO project and the funding support from Austrian Government. References 1. Grisino, http://www.grisino.at (last accessed: 31.08.2006). 2. A. Chervenak, I. Foster, C. Kesselman, C. Salisbury, and S. Tuecke. The data grid: Towards an architecture for the distributed management and analysis of large scientific datasets, 1999. 3. K. Czajkowski, D. Ferguson, I. Foster, J. Frey, S. Graham, I. Sedukhin, D. Snelling, S. Tuecke, and W. Vambenepe. The WS-Resource Framework, July 2004. 4. D. de Roure, N. Jennings, and N. R. Shadbolt. The Semantic Grid: Past, Present, and Future. In Proceedings of the IEEE, VOL.93, NO.3, 2005. 5. D. Fensel and C. Bussler. The Web Service Modeling Framework WSMF. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 1(2):113{137, 2002. 6. I. Foster and C. Kesselman. The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastruc- ture. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999. 7. I. Foster, C. Kesselman, J. Nick, and S. Tuecke. The Physiology of the Grid: An Open Grid Services Architecture for Distributed Systems Integration, 2002. 8. I. Foster, C. Kesselman, and S. Tuecke. The Anatomy of the Grid: Enabling Scalable Virtual Organizations. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2150:1{26, 2001.
        Speaker: Mr Ioan Toma (DERI Innsbruck)
      • 14:00
        User Level Scheduling for improved Quality of Service in the Grid 20m
        Currently the largest Grids lack an appropriate level of the Quality of Service (QoS) in two ways: due to size and complexity the Grid is not enough reliable and a simple, batch-oriented processing model is suboptimal for a number of applications. User-level scheduling is a light software technique that enables new capabilities to be added and QoS characteristics and reliability to be improved, on top of the existing Grid middleware and infrastructure. User-level scheduling techniques may be used to reduce the job turnaround time and to provide a more stable and predictable job output rate. Splitting the processing into many fine-grained tasks improves the load balancing and ensures that the worker nodes are used efficiently. As the result the computing resources may be returned to the Grid faster. We discuss the implications of this technique for the users, the application developers and the resource providers. Applications which have been interfaced with the user-level scheduler follow the master/worker model and include High Energy Physics data analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, Biomed applications and others. Distributed frequency analysis for the ITU and the autodoc-based drug discovery are the recent large-scale activities which are discussed in separate talks during the conference.
        Speaker: Mr Jakub MOSCICKI (CERN)
      • 14:00
        VO AUGER.ORG - Preparation and First Applications 20m
        Auger collaboration (www.auger.org) builds a huge detector for a measurement of ultra high energy cosmic rays. EGEE grid tools are evaluated if they are suitable for a data distribution and a running of Monte Carlo simulations. We prepared infrastructure for the new VO and we added first computing resources. A status of a simple user friendly framework for CORSIKA simulation jobs will be presented. We expect that this poster will help to add new resources to the AUGER.ORG VO.
        Speakers: Mrs Jaroslava Schovancova (CESNET), Dr Jiri Chudoba (Institute of Physics and CESNET)
      • 14:00
        VO VOCE - Availability and Stability of Resources 20m
        We monitor resources for VO VOCE by bunches of very short jobs sent to all computing elements supporting VOCE available in the time of test. Some sites reserve special nodes or queues for standard Site Functional Tests, in our approach we get the same response as a normal user without privileges. We obtain not only binary result passed/failed, but a percentage of jobs finished successfully. From these tests we can conclude that some resources are able to run short analysis jobs. Additional statistics about performance of VOCE Resource Brokers is collected.
        Speakers: Jaroslava Schovancova (CESNET), Dr Jiri Chudoba (Institute of Physics and CESNET)
      • 14:00
        XtremWeb-CH : Towards a true Peer-To-Peer platform for High Performance Computing 20m
        XtremWeb-CH (www.xtremwebch.net) is an applied research project carried out at the University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland. XtremWeb-CH aims at building an effective Peer-To-Peer Large Scale Distributed System for high performance needs. A typical XtremWeb-CH platform is composed of one coordinator and several workers (remote resources). The coordinator is a three-tier layer allowing “connection” between the users of high performance applications and the workers. XtremWeb-CH supports four functionalities: 1. Volatility of workers: When a worker voluntarily or involuntarily disappears, the task allocated to it is automatically assigned to another worker. 2. Automatic execution of Parallel and Distributed Applications: a high performance application is generally composed of a set of communicating tasks. XtremWeb-CH insures the automatic transfer of data between workers executing communicating tasks. 3. Direct communication between workers: Communication between tasks can take place without passing through the coordinator. The coordinator keeps only the responsibility of assigning tasks to workers. 4. Load balancing: XtremWeb-CH optimizes the granularity of the application according to the “state” of the platform. During the “compilation” step, the number of tasks and the workload (quantity of data to be processed) of each task are fixed according to the number of the available workers and their performance. During execution, a scheduling algorithm assigns tasks to workers according to the workload of the former and the performance of the latter. XtremWeb-CH provides a set of monitoring tools allowing users to visualize the execution of their applications: tasks allocation, execution progression, step by step execution, etc. XtremWeb-CH is evaluated in a real case of a CPU time consuming application, PHYLogeny Inference Package: PHYLIP (http://evolution.genetics.washington.edu/phylip.html). The parallelized version of PHYLIP is used by the virology laboratory of Geneva Hospital in order to generate phylogenetic tree related to HIV virus.
        Speaker: Prof. Nabil Abdennadher (University of Applied Sciences Geneva. (HES-SO))
      • 14:20
        International Telecommunication Union Regional Radio Conference and the EGEE Grid 10m
        Speaker: Dr Andrea Manara (ITU-BR)
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee break 30m
    • 16:00 18:10
      Business: Reporting and initial feedback & Follow-up Conf. Room 4

      Conf. Room 4

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Grid in Automotive, Finance & Petroleum

      75% of major investment banks are already using Grid
      computing and Petroleum and Automotive look set to become
      an adopters of Grid technology.

      Focusing on these three areas, this session offers an
      overview of some deployed cases, the main achievements and
      obstacles involved to a wider deployment and success stories
      and how EGEE may support these sectors.



      Reporting & Initial Feedback

      The session includes the speakers of each of the
      parallel sessions within the Business Track to offer an
      overview of their session to share with the audience.

      • 16:00
        Tomasz Szepieniec, Senior Consultant at GridwiseTech, Poland - Connecting large industry to EGEE grid 20m
        GridwiseTech, the independent expert in Grid technology succeeded in connecting the first large industrial customer to the EGEE infrastructure. LHC Computing Grid Project (LCG) is said to be the first worldwide deployed Grid production system, so far mainly serving academy. However, with thousands of distributed assets interconnected with unconventional technology, it has great potential to become virtual hub for businesses, the role that Stanford had for what later become the Silicon Valley. GridwiseTech, recently awarded as top innovator for deploying scientific results in industry, helps companies to hook up to the EGEE infrastructure in the process of virtualizing their infrastructure. In this presentation, GridwiseTech's Tomasz Szepieniec will explain how we made the large European corporation use LCG-enabled resources for their engineering needs, potentially reducing the design cycles from months to hours. Our solution can easily serve other industrial customers, thus creating foundations for Europe-wide business grid.
        Speaker: Tomasz Szepieniec
        Slides
      • 16:20
        Sverre Jarp, CERN openlab CTO. Grid-related activities in CERN openlab II 20m
        CERN openlab II is a partnership between industry and CERN with an aim to demonstrate the relevance of new and innovative technological solutions for scientific computing. Current partners are HP, Intel and Oracle. Inside openlab two competence centres have been defined: a Platform Competence Centre (PCC) with its main focus on the evolution of the computing hardware and related software; and a Grid Interoperability and Integration Centre (GIC) with a close link to EGEE-II. The talk will briefly explain the way industrial partners can get involved with openlab and review the initial results and future plans for the activities that are relevant to Grid computing.
        Speaker: Jarp Sverre
        Slides
      • 16:40
        Giuseppe Ugolotti - NICE Italy - GENIUS Portal and EnginFrame FrameWork: new features and future perspectives 20m
        GENIUS is a powerful Grid Portal jointly developed by INFN and NICE srl within the INFN Grid Project . It provides to end users secure, uniform, pervasive and ubiquitous access to distributed, high-end computational resources, services and applications through a standard Web browser or through a flexible Web Services interface. EnginFrame and GENIUS greatly simplify the use of Grid-enabled applications and services, so they have been adopted by several important industrial companies all over the world and by many leading research & educational institutes. In particular GENIUS has been installed in many EGEE sites, with satisfaction of users and site managers and has been a core technology in the context of the GILDA dissemination testbed. Based on the latest version of the EnginFrame framework by Nice srl and thanks to work done during the last year for supporting the latest release of the gLite middleware, GENIUS now presents some new important features and improvements and it is going to face key challenges as interoperability between different flavours of Grid middleware.
        Speaker: Giuseppe Ugolotti (NICE Italy)
        Slides
      • 17:00
        Discussion - With chairs from each session acting as Panelists Bob Jones, Ian Osborne, Mike Doran, Silvana Muscella, Monica Marinucci Chair: Nathan Hill - Qi3 UK. 45m
        The Business Track will conclude with a Panel Discussion involving leading experts and chairs from the Business Track who will evaluate the previous sessions, the main discussions and issues that have come out from each session. The objective from here will be to develop recommendations and next steps that build on the presentations case studies, success stories presented and valuable knowledge exchange that has take place over the two day business track.
        Speakers: Dr Bob Jones (CERN), Ian OSBORNE, Mike Doran (CERN), Monica Marinucci Lopez (Unknown), Nathan HILL, Silvana Muscella
    • 16:00 17:30
      EGEE, ETICS, OMII-Europe Conf. Room 17

      Conf. Room 17

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      In this session we provide an overview on the joint
      work between EGEE, ETICS and OMII-Europe and
      discuss joint future plans between these three projects.

      • 16:00
        OMII-Europe: Status, Plans, and Interactions with EGEE & ETICS 20m
        Speaker: Steven Newhouse (OMII)
        Slides
      • 16:20
        ETICS: Status, Plans, and Interactions with OMII-Europe & EGEE 20m
        Speaker: Dr Alberto Di Meglio (CERN)
        Slides
      • 16:40
        EGEE: Status, Plans, and Interactions with OMII-Europe & ETICS 20m
        Speaker: Erwin Laure (CERN)
        Slides
      • 17:00
        Discussion 30m
    • 16:00 17:30
      EU China Grid, Interoperability Conf. Room 16

      Conf. Room 16

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This meeting will follow up work begun in the
      EUChinaGrid workshop in June 2006. The resulting
      document, discussing issues in interoperability between
      gLite and GOS, will be discussed and developers of both
      middlewares will move towards defining a work plan.

      • 16:00
        Introduction 10m
        Speaker: Dr Giuseppe Andronico (INFN SEZIONE DI CATANIA)
        Slides
      • 16:10
        gLite view on interopereability 15m
        Speaker: Salvatore Monforte (Unknown)
        Slides
      • 16:25
        GOS vew on interoperability 15m
        Speaker: Yongjian Wang (Behiang University)
        Slides
      • 16:40
        Proposed roadmap 20m
        EUChinaGrid speaker
        Speaker: Dr Giuseppe Andronico (INFN SEZIONE DI CATANIA)
        Slides
      • 17:00
        Panel on gLite-GOS interoperability 30m
        Slides
    • 16:00 17:30
      Grid Security Vulnerability Group (Closed meeting) Conf. Room 15

      Conf. Room 15

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      CLOSED MEETING

      The Grid Security Vulnerability Group meeting will be a
      closed meeting, for GSVG/Task TSA1.4.2 members, and
      others by invitation. It will be roughly divided into 3.
      We will briefly review the procedures for tackling specific
      issues, and sort out any remaining problems. We will
      discuss the other vulnerability work we will do, other
      than the specific issues group, in particular to progress
      work of some people who are providing effort to the
      task but are not in the issues group. We will
      also discuss plans for producing the deliverable
      DSA1.3, "Grid Services Security Vulnerability and Risk
      Analysis" which is a Month 10 deliverable of task
      TSA1.4.2.



      If you are not already involved with the GSVG and
      would like to attend the meeting, please contact
      L.A.Cornwall@rl.ac.uk

      • 16:00
        DSA1.3 deliverable 1h
        DSA1.3, "Grid Services Security Vulnerability and Risk Analysis" is a Month 10 deliverable of task TSA1.4.2. We should discuss the table of contents and how it is produced.
      • 17:00
        AOB 25m
    • 16:00 19:00
      Grid operation CIC on Duty (COD-10) (closed meeting): Parallel session Conf. Room 18

      Conf. Room 18

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Meeting of COD-on-Duty teams operating the daily
      monitoring
      of the EGEE/LCG grid: feedback is collected, procedures
      and
      tools are discussed and enhanced.

      • 16:00
        Parallel session #1 1h 30m
        Meeting of COD-on-Duty teams operating the daily monitoring of the EGEE/LCG grid: feedback is collected, procedures and tools are discussed and enhanced.
      • 17:30
        Parallel session (cont'd) 1h
      • 18:30
        Wrap-up , actions list and conclusions 30m
    • 16:00 17:30
      ICEAGE Forum Conf. Room 7+8

      Conf. Room 7+8

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      The ICEAGE forum is a meeting of world experts in grids
      and education which
      has the function of developing policy, standards and
      collecting best
      practice with the aim of supporting academic uptake of
      grid teaching.
      The meeting of the Forum in Geneva is paired with an
      earlier meeting at the
      OGF conference in Washington, to allow contributions
      from both the
      US/Pacific Rim and Europe.

      These meetings will build on the successful inaugural
      meeting of the Forum
      in Italy in July.

      • 16:00
        Planning and producing publications of the ICEAGE forum 1h
      • 17:00
        Wrap up 30m
    • 16:00 17:00
      Life Sciences (NA4): Drug discovery Conf. Room 2

      Conf. Room 2

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      The NA4 Life Sciences session will be the opportunity to
      review the status of the biomedical applications
      deployed on EGEE. Time will be dedicated to discussion
      with related projects and presentations selected from
      the conference call for abstracts.
      The session is divided in three subsessions dedicated
      to medical imaging, bioinformatics and drug discovery.

      • 16:00
        WISDOM: from docking to virtual screening 20m
        The talk will present the status of the analysis of WISDOM-I results and the work being done within the BioinfoGRID project to deploy Molecular Dynamics computations on EGEE
        Speaker: Mr Vinod Kasam (CNRS-IN2P3)
        Slides
      • 16:20
        H5N1 data challenge: status and results 20m
        The talk will provide an overview of the H5N1 data challenge deployed in April-May 2006. It will provide information on grid deployment metrics as well as information on the biological analysis going-on.
        Speaker: Mr Hurng-Chun Lee (ASGC)
        Slides
      • 16:40
        WISDOM-II: status of preparation 20m
        The talk will provide an update on the status of WISDOM-II, the next docking data challenge to take place from October 1st 2006. Information will be provided on the targets to be docked and the grid deployment strategies.
        Speaker: Mr Nicolas Jacq (CNRS-IN2P3)
        Slides
    • 16:00 17:30
      NGI Workshop Conf. Room 13

      Conf. Room 13

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      (Closed)
      This session will map the current status of National Grid
      Initiatives in as many countries represented in the EGEE-
      II project as possible, as well as representatives from
      other areas where the NGI concept is debated. The
      inputs about the status of their
      National Grid Initiatives and / or major national Grid
      projects and efforts have been collected from participating
      countries via a pre-distributed questionnaire. The
      Policy Workshop will also give important information
      about the different countries' status. The perspectives for
      FP7 in each country will also be documented.

      • 16:00
        Discussion on the next steps - Towards a European Grid Initiative (continued) 1h 30m
        This will be an open discussion on the next steps on the path towards a European Grid Initiative. Forming an Association of NGIs or an Association for the promotion of NGIs will be discussed. Note that a next workshop on EGI will be organised at the end of this year or the beginning of next year.
    • 17:00 19:30
      Demo session
      Convener: Massimo Lamanna (CERN)
      • 17:00
        AMGA Web Interface 20m
        AMGA Web Interface is the implementation of the metadata interface designed by the ARDA team and it is the official metadata service of the EGEE gLite middleware. It provides many interesting features: metadata organization in a hierarchical structure, users, groups and ACLs handling with X509 certificates/proxies support, powerful SQL-like query language, replications. However, interacting with the AMGA services is not always user friendly especially for the non-expert users because the provided clients are unix command line tools and APIs. So the need for a simple and user friendly interface to manage metadata with AMGA arises. We thought to a web interface to achieve access from any platform: the user just needs a web browser and a VOMS proxy to be authenticated to the AMGA server. After a successful login, he will be able to browse the hierarchy of AMGA collections, to inspect their schema and permissions, and to list their entries. He also has the ability to create a new collection, to define a metadata schema for it, add/edit/delete its entries, and finally to perform queries against its attribute. In all the previous operations, the respect of the collection and entry permissions will be guaranteed allowing users to access information for which he is actually authorized, thanks to the underlying usage of the AMGA APIs. In future versions, a module to handle users and groups will be added. At the moment, a user needs to own an account in the underlying AMGA server, and he can only set permissions and ACLs per collection, granting access to already existent AMGA groups. AMGA WI is a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) web application developed with pure Java technologies (Java Servlet, Java Server Pages, Custom Tag Libraries). The application design follows the standard multi-layer web application architecture consisting of a data presentation layer, a logic application layer and a data access layer. All these layers are built making use of the official AMGA Java APIs. The data presentation layer consists of all web pages that make users able to access all provided features. These pages have a dynamic contents, according to the data stored into the AMGA Server backend. The web pages work with both logic components to perform data manipulation and with access components to retrieve and publish data. The logic application layer is made up by all the software modules that encapsule the implementation of the provided feautures (metadata handling and manipulation). Every AMGA logical entity (collection, entry, attribute,..) is mapped to a specific software module. This ensures a very clean and simple software architecture with an high degree of cohesion and decoupling. These components work as services invoked by the overlying web pages. The data access layer implements all the software components than ensure the data extraction from the AMGA server. These components work as services invoked by the web pages and they provide a mechanism to retrieve data and publish dynamic content. A working beta version will be showed during the demo session at EGEE 06 conference.
        Speaker: Dr Salvatore Scifo (INFN Catania)
      • 17:00
        An advanced Grid data management for distributed analysis of neuroimaging studies 20m
        The SPM software package, based on the comparison of the candidate case to normal cases through a Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) algorithm, is largely used by the neurological research community to quantify ipometabolic patterns in brain PET/SPECT studies for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Since the accuracy of ipoperfusion maps is strictly related to the number of normal studies compared to the test image, a large set of images of normal patients is required for an accurate statistical analysis. However, due to ethical issues and to high costs of neuroimaging technologies, PET/SPECT studies for normal patients are very rare. Moreover, because of privacy and security issues, the images of normal subjects cannot be freely moved between sites or published by the centre that collected them. As a consequence, only doctors working at very large institutions, locally owning large databases of normal images, can usually carry out SPM-based analyses. With our application, doctors from small peripheral hospitals can remotely access large sets of normal PET/SPECT images provided by different medical research institutes and extract the information needed for the statistical analysis without moving the original image files. Grid technologies allow easy access to distributed data as well as to distributed computational resources. In order to provide a user friendly interface, remote access to SPM is being made available through the Italian Portal of Neuroinformatics. The portal contains a section entirely dedicated to the statistical analysis of PET/SPECT images, accessible by authorized users only. Directly from the portal, any authorised user can upload the suspect AD image, select normal cases for statistical calculation, and eventually collect the results of analysis. The basic steps of the Grid implementation of the SPM portal service are listed below: 1. Acquisition of the test image on the user node 2. Transfer of the test image to the management node 3. Query on DB catalogue of normal images on the management node 4. Transfer of a small software executable for information extraction to the repository nodes 5. Extraction from normal images of the information needed for the statistical analysis 6. Transfer of the extracted information to the management node 7. SPM statistical analysis on the management node 8. Transfer of SPM results to the user node In many eHealth Grid applications, the crucial point is a reliable and efficient data and metadata management. In our application this is needed for identifying suitable normal images across hospitals. From a data management point of view, the mandatory requirements for the Grid implementation of the above described SPM application are the following: - resources and services for the storage of PET/SPECT images on different Grid sites; - data management services for the registration in a catalogue and the association of metadata to images. Two different environments (gLite and AliEn) have been experimented, especially as regards their functionalities concerning the management of metadata, enabling institutions to choose the deployment that better fits their needs and resources. In both environments, integration with the portal allows seamless GUI interaction with the available functionalities from the catalogue, the analysis software and portal services. Through the portal users can transparently exploit both systems. Both environments have provided satisfactory results.
        Speaker: Livia Torterolo (University of Genoa)
      • 17:00
        ARTE and ImpECt: exploiting the Diligent prototype 20m
        DILIGENT is an ongoing EU IST project whose goal is to deliver an infrastructure making possible to define and dynamically create virtual digital libraries by reusing available resources. A virtual digital library is a pool of resources dynamically aggregated to meet the user requirements where these resources range from information sources to services exploiting computing and storage Grid capabilities. In addition to such main goal and to prove the viability of the released infrastructure to meet their requirements and improve their daily work, two user communities (ARTE and ImpECt) belonging to different application contexts have been selected. As a consequence, DILIGENT is a project that sits over Grid and Digital Library (DL) technologies and it is influenced by requirements arising in the Cultural Heritage and Earth Observation domains (the user communities). In particular, the project heavily relies on the concept of resources sharing because the foundational concept of virtual digital library has been envisaged by elaborating on and cannot be implemented without this Grid facility. By providing to the user communities (i) the capability to dynamically create DL, and (ii) to have access to an huge computing and storage capability, all this with an acceptable management cost, DILIGENT promises to revolutionise the way through which joint research is conducted and propose novel application scenarios. New kinds of functionality can be envisaged or improvement of already existing functionality can be implemented, the management of new kind of knowledge becomes feasible, new way to organise research processes can be implemented. In such a scenario EGEE plays a fundamental role. In fact, being EGEE in charge to provide a big production quality Grid infrastructure serving a myriad of applications, it represents the most attractive provider for an organised and ready to use pool of computing and storage facilities. The Diligent project is currently testing the first prototype that will be delivered by the end of September ’06. According to the Diligent implementation plan, this version is not fully-fledged. Rather it supports the basic DL functionalities required to satisfy the main user communities’ requirements. The aim of this demo is to introduce the current Diligent prototype through the presentation of the ImpECt and the ARTE application scenarios. The ImpECt scenario (Implementation of Environmental Conventions) demonstrates the use of a grid-based digital library for Earth Sciences. The ImpECt digital library, besides the Diligent basic services, is currently providing access to the following information sources and services: (1) a collection of processed satellite images showing the vegetation index; (2) a collection of digital objects about background information on MERIS; (3) the MGVI (MERIS Global Vegetation Index) external service. The sources together with their metadata are maintained by the DILIGENT content management and metadata management, and can be queried by region, time, and content. The MGVI service is integrated by means of the DILIGENT process management. In addition, searches on external sources (e.g. Google) are supported using the DILIGENT search facilities. Search results can be browsed and used for generating, for a particular time frame and location, environmental reports based on a user-defined template. These user-defined reports can then be saved and indexed in the digital library as newly available information. The user interface for search, result browsing, and report generation is realized by means of portlets hosted on a GridSphere portal. The ARTE scenario demonstrates the use of a grid-based digital library for cultural heritage domain. Its community, represented by educational institutions (Schools and/or Universities) and by the Italian educational broadcasting network, shares a set of archives with multimedia content with the aim to combine them in complex learning objects, named courses. Once a course is built, it is stored and made available to be reused in and adapted for new didactic contexts. In addition to the management of courses, the ARTE DL provides functionalities to store, manage, and retrieve all kind of information objects related to them, such as images, texts, audio/video recording, etc. The current ARTE DL provides access to a number of community specific information sources, such as between the others, the "Progetto Emblemata. 'Con parola brieve e con figura' Libri antichi di imprese e di emblemi"; “A Celebration Of Women Writers”; “Arts And Humanities Data Service”; “Bayerische”; “Gallica”; “Perseus”; “Emblem Project Utrecht”; “RAI Medita” collections. In order to securely store and make available these set of copyrighted information objects on the Diligent Grid infrastructure, the Diligent content security facilities have been largely used.
        Speaker: Veronica Guidetti (ESA-ESRIN)
      • 17:00
        Browsing through AMGA metadata 20m
        The demo shows two types of browser applications developed on top of the gLite metadata catalogue AMGA. The first one is a generic database GUI which allows an interactive exploration of the metadata schema and entries plus the possibility to issue SQL queries on the catalogue itself. The second one is a specialised version developed for the LHCb experiments. In this case the system has been tailored to execute the allowed users' queries. This system allows usage from other applications (as Ganga, the ATLAS and LHCb grid user interface) and via a GUI. This browser has also a role in allowing seamless migration from early LHCb metadata prototypes: the system can issue the same queries on other backend (XML-RPC Oracle prototype). Both systems benefit from the main features of AMGA, namely efficient access to database backends and flexible security features.
        Speaker: Danilo Piparo (Univ Milano Bicocca and CERN)
      • 17:00
        Climate data analysis on EGEE 20m
        Climate research is generally very data-intensive. Observations, analysis and output data of climate simulations are traditionally stored in large archives and central databases. In order to make this data searchable and accessible for further analysis and/or data comparison on the grid appropriate interfaces between the existing data storage systems and the EGEE infrastructure need to be established. This interface is realized in close collaboration with the German C3-Grid project, which currently establishes a common metadata model, and metadata publishing infrastructure as well as data access mechanism. With respect to metadata these developments are based on international standards like the ISO 19115 / 19139 XML metadata schema and the OAI (open archives initiative) metadata harvesting approach. For data access a common community web service interface is developed which triggers complex data selection procedures and makes the result available on gridftp accessible storage. As a prerequisite for the data access a metadata catalogue, containing information for discovery and access of available datasets is needed. To make the metadata descriptions of the existing databases available on the EGEE infrastructure the AMGA catalogue is used. The catalogues is updated by means of XML descriptions, which are harvested on a regular basis from the existing datacenters. The upload of discovered data files from the external database to the EGEE infrastructure is based on webservices and gridftp: Based on information from the metadata catalogue the appropriate webservice endpoint is contacted from within an EGEE data analysis job. This webservice triggers data preprocessing functionality and delivers the result to a local gridftp accessible workspace from where they can be retrieved, stored on an SE and registered as EGEE accessible. In order to exemplify the added value for the climate community we will show components of a complete workflow of searching, accessing and analysing climate data supported by the established interfaces.
        Speakers: Dr Kerstin Ronneberger (DKRZ), Dr Stephan Kindermann (DKRZ)
      • 17:00
        Dashboard for ATLAS and CMS LHC experiments 20m
        Dashboard project for CMS and ATLAS experiments has to provide a single entry point for the monitoring information collected from the distributed computing systems of the corresponding experiment. One of the main functionalities provided by the experiment dashboard is job monitoring. Dashboard job monitoring service presents a complete view of the experiment activity on the Grid infrastructure independently of the Grid flavour and compiles a comprehensive picture of the overall success rate. Dashboard combines Grid-related monitoring data and experiment specific information. One of the main purposes of the experiment dashboard is to indicate any job submission/execution problem and to help to identify the reason of the problem of any origin. In addition to job monitoring experiment dashboard covers other experiment activities on the Grid, like for example data management for ATLAS and data transfer tests for CMS.
        Speaker: Julia Andreeva (CERN)
      • 17:00
        Demonstration of Application Migration to EGEE using GridWay 20m
        The EGEE project has created the largest production-level Grid infrastructure in the world, which provides a level of performance and reliability never achieved before. The efforts made in the project includes a wide range of activities from the deployment and management of this vast infrastructure or middleware development, to user training. Among them, application porting is of crucial interest to the scientific community. In this context, we have seen a proliferation of web portals and ad-hoc middleware developments to ease the use of Grid by different scientist communities. However the actual infrastructure lacks of a common, consistent and general application development framework. The use of standard Grid Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) could aid the rapid development and distribution of applications across the Grid. Moreover, the use of a standard API will help new users to port their applications to an unfamiliar environment; and will minimize the impact of the modifications on the EGEE middleware, as the interfaces would remain unchanged. In this sense, the Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA) GGF specification constitutes an homogeneous interface to different Distributed Resource Management Systems (DRMS) to handle job submission, monitoring and control, and retrieval of finished job status. The DRMAA standard represents a suitable and portable framework to express scientific distributed computations. Also, DRMAA could reduce the application development cycle. A Grid application could be developed, tested and debugged using the organization local cluster -DRMAA implementations includes Condor, SGE and PBS- and then executed on the EGEE Grid using the GridWay Metascheduler. In this demonstration we will show how to use DRMAA to develop Grid applications. As an example we will consider a Fusion Ray Tracing application, part of the NA4 Fusion activities. In particular, we will use the DRMAA C and JAVA implementations provided by GridWay, and resources from the Fusion VO. GridWay is an open-source meta-scheduler which gives end users, application developers and managers of Grid infrastructures a scheduling functionality similar to that found on local DRMS. Additionally, we will show in this demonstration GridWay scheduling and resource management functionality, and command line interface.
        Speakers: Mr Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti (Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)), Mr Rafael Gil-Herrera (Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain))
      • 17:00
        GPS@, Web interface for Protein Sequence Analysis on Grid 20m
        Bioinformatics analysis of data produced by high-throughput biology, for instance genome projects [1], is one of the major challenges for the next years. Some of the requirements of this analysis are to access up-to-date databanks (of sequences, patterns, 3D structures, etc.) and relevant algorithms (for sequence similarity, multiple alignment, pattern scanning, etc.) [2]. Since 1998, we are developing the NPS@ Web server ([3], Network Protein Sequence Analysis), that provides the biologist with many of the most common resources for protein sequence analysis, integrated into a common workflow. These methods and data can be accessed through simple web browsing and HTTP connection, or througth high-level bioinformatics interface like MPSA program [4] or AntheProt [5]. Today, the computing resources available behind the NPS@ Web portal limit the capabilities of our server, as it is the case also for other genomics and proteomics Web portals. Indeed some methods are very computing-time and memory consuming. Our NPS@ portal is facing an increasing demand of CPU and disk resources and the management of numerous bioinformatics resources (algorithms, databanks). NPS@ [3] is providing biologist with a Web form to input their data (protein sequences) in order to run a BLAST analysis against a given protein sequence database. User pastes his sequence of protein in the corresponding field. Then he chooses the database that will be scan with the query sequence. All the protein databases available on NPS@ can be selected through a multi-valued list of the form. GPS@ grid web portal (Grid Protein Sequence Analysis, http://gpsa-pbil.ibcp.fr) is the grid release of the NPS@ bioinformatics portal. GPS@ hides the mechanisms required for submitting bioinformatics analyses on the grid infrastructure. Selecting the “EGEE” check-box will schedule the submission of the BLAST on the EGEE grid [6] when clicking on the “submit” button. The bioinformatics algorithms and databases available on GPS@ have been distributed and registered on the grid and GPS@ runs its own EGEE interface to the grid. First, the job description in the Web form is converted into a JDL file, that can then be submitted to the workload management system of EGEE. The GPS@ sub-process that have submitted the job, is also checking periodically the status of this job by querying the resource broker with the good commands. All steps are notified to the user through the Web page of the submission, indicating the time and the duration of the current step. When achieved, i.e. reaching the “Done” step, the GPS@ automat downloads the result file from BLAST. Then this raw result file in BLAST format is processed and converted into a HTML page showing, in a colored and graphical way, the list of similar protein sequences, and also graph and pairwise alignments of them. This formatting process is directly inherited from the original NPS@ portal, providing biologists with a well-known interface and way of displaying results. GPS@ portal makes the Bioinformatics job submission easier on the grid, and provide biologist with the benefit of the EGEE grid infrastructure to analyze large biological dataset: e.g. including several protein secondary structure predictions into a multiple alignment, or clustering a sequence set by analyzing, with BLAST or SSEARCH, each sequence against the others, … Acknowledgements This work has been funded by GriPPS project (ACI GRID PPL02-05), EGEE project (EU FP6, ref. INFSO-508833) and EMBRACE Network of Excellence (EU FP6, LHSG-CT-2004-512092). References [1] Bernal, A., Ear, U., Kyrpides, N. : Genomes OnLine Database (GOLD): a monitor of genome projects world- wide. NAR 29 (2001) 126-127 [2] G. Perrière, C. Combet, S. Penel, C. Blanchet, J. Thioulouse, C. Geourjon, J. Grassot, C. Charavay, M. Gouy, L. Duret and G. Deléage, Integrated databanks access and sequence/structure analysis services at the PBIL. Nucleic Acids Res., 31:3393-3399, 2003. [3] Combet, C., Blanchet, C., Geourjon, C. et Deléage, G. : NPS@: Network Protein Sequence Analysis. Tibs, 25 (2000) 147-150. [4] Blanchet, C., Combet, C., Geourjon, C. et Deléage, G. : MPSA: Integrated System for Multiple Protein Sequence Analysis with client/server capabilities. Bioinformatics, 16 (2000) 286-287. [5] Deleage, G, Combet, C, Blanchet, C, Geourjon, C. : ANTHEPROT: an integrated protein sequence analysis software with client/server capabilities. Comput Biol Med., 31 (2001) 259-267 [6] EGEE – Enabling Grid for E-science in Europe; http://www.eu-egee.org
        Speaker: Dr Christophe Blanchet (Institut de Biologie et Chimie des Protéines (IBCP UMR 5086); CNRS; Univ. Lyon 1;)
      • 17:00
        Grid-enabled high throughput virtual screening against neglected and emerging diseases 20m
        Malaria is a dreadful disease affecting 300 million people and killing 1.5 million people every year. Drug resistance has emerged for all classes of antimalarials except artemisinins. This example illustrates the real need for new drugs against neglected diseases. There are millions of chemical compounds available, but it is nearly impossible and very expensive to screen such a high number of compounds in the experimental laboratories by high throughput screening. Besides the high costs, the hit rate is quite low [1]. An alternative is high throughput virtual screening by molecular docking, a technique which can screen millions of compounds rapidly, reliably and cost effectively. Screening each compound, depending on structural complexity, can take from a few minutes to hours on a standard PC, which means screening all compounds in a single database can take years. Computation time can be reduced very significantly with a large grid gathering thousands of computers [2]. In 2005, for the first time, we have been able to deploy large scale virtual docking within the framework of the WISDOM initiative [3] against plasmepsin, the aspartic protease of Plasmodium, responsible for the initial cleavage of human haemoglobin [4]: more than 46 million ligands were docked in less than 6 weeks using about 80 years of CPU on the EGEE [5] infrastructure. Up to 1700 computers were simultaneously used in 15 countries around the world. Commercial software with a server license was successfully deployed on more than 1000 machines at the same time. At the end of the large scale docking deployment, 100 compounds have been selected for post processing based on the docking score, the binding mode of the compound inside the binding pocket and the interactions of the compounds to key residues of the protein [6]. Some of the compounds identified were similar to already known plasmepsin inhibitors, like the Urea analogues which were already established as micro molar inhibitors for plasmepsins. This indicates that the overall approach is sensible and large scale docking on computational grids has real potential to identify new inhibitors. In addition to this the Guanidino analogues are very promising and most likely to become a novel class of plasmepsin inhibitors. This success led to a second computing challenge targeting Avian Flu neuraminidase N1 that required more than 100 CPU years on the EGEE, Auvergrid and TWGrid infrastructures in April and May 2006 [7]. Potential drug compounds against avian flu are now being identified and ranked according to the binding energies of the docked models. At least 50 compounds will be assayed experimentally at identified laboratories. The WISDOM production environment was designed to achieve production of a large amount of data in a limited time using EGEE, Auvergrid and TWGrid middleware services. Three packages were developed in Perl and Java. Their entry points are a simple command line tool. The first package installs the application components (software, compounds database…) on the grid computing nodes. The second package tests these components. The third package monitors the submission and the execution of the WISDOM jobs thank to the Workload Management System and the Data Management. The used production service is LCG-2. This abstract has presented pioneering activities in the field of grid enabled virtual screening against neglected and emerging diseases in Europe. These achievements demonstrated the relevance of large scale grids for the drug discovery process and to enable world-wide and multidisciplinary collaboration. Using the grid to identify the most promising leads for biological tests speeds up the development process, frees up medicinal chemists’ time, and concentrates their biological assays in the laboratory on the most promising components. To illustrate the grid impact, a demonstration [8] will show the number of compounds that can be docked on several grid infrastructures during the conference time. Thousands docking jobs are submitted at the beginning of the conference. The visitor can follow the progress of the experiment during the conference time by a led display and several statistic figures (success rate, CPU days consumed, number of jobs vs. site…). The strategy for virtual screening on the grid is presented as well as the grid infrastructures used. The demonstration visualization will be available during the conference time on http://wisdom-demo.healthgrid.org. It receives the Best Demo Award during the Healthgrid 2006 conference. [1] R.W. Spencer, Highthroughput virtual screening of historic collections on the file size, biological targets, and file diversity, Biotechnol. Bioeng 61 (1998) 61- 67. [2] A. Chien et al., Grid technologies empowering drug discovery, Drug Discovery Today, 7 Suppl 20 (2002) 176-180. [3] See http://wisdom.eu-egee.fr/ [4] V. Breton, et al., Grid added value to address malaria, Proceedings of the 6- th IEEE/ACM CCGrid conference (2006). [5] F. Gagliardi, et al., Building an infrastructure for scientific Grid computing: status and goals of the EGEE project, Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 363 (2005) 1729-1742 [6] N. Jacq, et al., Grid-enabled High Throughput Virtual Screening, accepted for the proceedings of GCCB 2006, (2006) [7] H.-C. Lee, et al., Grid-enabled High-throughput in silico Screening against Influenza A Neuraminidase, Proceedings of the NETTAB 2006 workshop, (2006) [8] N. Jacq, et al., Demonstration of In Silico Docking at a Large Scale on Grid Infrastructure, Proceedings of Healthgrid conference 2006, Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 120 (2006) 155-157, PMID: 16823133.
        Speaker: Mr Nicolas Jacq (CNRS/IN2P3)
      • 17:00
        Interactive Virtual Screening on the Grid 20m
        Recent studies have suggested that the high pathogenic avian flu H5N1 virus has the potential of developing drug resistance and of acquiring the ability of human-to-human transmission. To enable biologists a better response to the threat, the second EGEE biomedical data challenge battling avian flu was set to screen 300,000 compounds against 8 predicted mutations of the Influenza A Neuraminidase for analyzing the efficiency of the known drugs and for searching new drugs. In April and May 2006, we succeeded to mobilize over 2,000 CPUs in the EGEE Grid infrastructure, demonstrating that the high-throughput screening (HTS) of drug analysis can be efficiently reproduced on the Grid using the WISDOM platform previously developed for the Malaria data challenge in last Summer. The 6-weeks activity has covered over 100 CPU years of CPU power required for the virtual screening process and has produced about 600 Gigabytes of docking results for further analysis. Current computing model of the Grid-enabled HTS adopts a coordinative way of execution in order to gain the docking throughput; however, to bring biologists a real end-user application for their daily research, the application usability needs to be improved taking into account the realistic usage patterns. For example, the preparation and deployment effort needed for starting the data challenge will not be appreciated by the users who frequently repeat the virtual screening for testing their libraries and docking parameters. The batch mode HTS is also not feasible for interactive analysis which can save biologists’ time by allowing them to start analyzing partial results on the fly instead of dealing with a huge amount of output at the end. In addition, biologists prefer a graphical user interface to configure domain-specific parameters. To improve the usability, we first introduced a light-weight framework called DIANE to enable the interactive analysis of the Grid-enabled virtual screening application. DIANE was originally developed for handling the distributed applications within a Master-Worker model. It provides an overlay system on top of the Grid system, in which the pull-mode scheduling and failure recovery mechanisms are implemented based on the CORBA protocol. On the other hand, the DIANE framework hides the details of the job operations on the Grid so that application developers can concentrate on the implementation of application logic, and end users benefit from the simplified job descriptions containing only intuitive and application specific parameters. The stability and efficiency of DIANE has been tested by taking a significant part of the avian flu data challenge. Following the successful avian flu data challenge, the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC) in Taiwan is in charge of developing a user-friendly docking environment leveraging on the DIANE framework. Building on top of the DIANE command-line interface, we have customized a web-based interface for biology end-users. Through the web interface, users can quickly set a filter on compound libraries, configure docking parameters, start-up and monitor their virtual screening activities on the EGEE production environment. During the job execution, the completed dockings are scored based on the binding energy. The docking complexes are available as soon as the results are produced; therefore biologists can progress on for further analysis without being blocked until their jobs are finished. A visualization interface of complex structures also aids biologists in analysis.
        Speaker: Mr Hurng-Chun Lee (ASGC, Taiwan)
      • 17:00
        Migrating Desktop Platform – graphical interactive framework for running grid applications 20m
        Due to the dynamic and complex nature of the Grid, it’s not easy to use it in a daily work. To attract new users, especially from scientific community, user friendly tools are needed to simplify access to the Grid. To solve this problem we introduce the concept of Migrating Desktop Platform which is a graphical, user oriented product that simplifies the use of the grid technology in the application area. Migrating Desktop Platform (MD) is an advanced graphical user interface and a set of tools combined with user-friendly outlook, similar to window based operating systems. It hides the complexity of the grid middleware and allows to access grid resources in an easy and transparent way with focus on interactive and parallel grid applications. These applications are both compute- and data-intensive and are characterized by the interaction with a person in a processing loop. MD can attract new users by its features: easy to use, platform independent, accessible from anywhere, enables possibility to easily add new application that can be batch or interactive, sequential or parallel. Thanks to its open architecture it can easily integrate existing or incoming tools - for example supporting grid operations or enabling collaborative work. Number of grid applications has already been integrated with MD framework. As a key product of CrossGrid project Migrating Desktop has proved its usefulness in everyday work of users’ community. Migrating Desktop was used in Polish grid project – Progress and is now used as an integration platform in EU BalticGrid project. Interactivity and MPI support is also continually developed in EU int.eu.grid project, while tools from MD will become part of Eclipse based grid toolbox developed by EU g Eclipse project. Platform overview The aim of Migrating Desktop is to provide scientists with a framework which hides the details of most of the Grid services and allows working with grid application in an easy and transparent way. The graphical user interface integrates and makes use of number of middleware and integrates the individual tools into a single product providing a complete grid front-end. It uses OSGi specification as a mechanism for discovering, integrating, and running modules called bundles. When MD is launched, the users can work with environment composed of the set of bundles. Usually a small tool is written as a single bundle, whereas a complex tool has its functionality split across several bundles. A bundle is the smallest unit of our platform that can be developed and delivered separately. Such approach allows increasing the functionality in an easy way without the need of architecture changes. Migrating Desktop framework allows users to access transparently the Grid resources, run sequential or interactive, batch or MPI applications, to monitor and visualize applications, and manage data files. MD provides a front-end framework for embedding some of the application mechanisms and interfaces, and allows the user to have virtual access to Grid resources from other computational nodes. MD is a front end to Roaming Access Server (RAS), which intermediates to communication with different grid middleware and applications. Roaming Access Server offers a well-defined set of web-services that can be used as an interface for accessing HPC systems and services (based on various technologies) in a common and standardized way. All the communication is based on the web services technology. This platform can work with different grid testbeds: based on LCG 2.7, gLite 3.0, Progress 1.0. Due to its open nature it can be extended with support for other testbeds. Applications: Example application use case: interactive application (CrossGrid) - Parallel ANN training application. This application is used to train an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) using simulated data for the DELPHI experiment. The ANN is trained to distinguish between signal (Higgs bosson) events and background event (in the demo the background used includes WW and QCD events). The evolution of the training can be monitored using MD with a graphics presenting current error, and 4 small graphics that show the ANN value vs. an event variable (that can be selected by the user). The application is compiled with MPICH-P4 for intracluster use and with MPICH-G2 for intercluster use. This application uses the interactive input channel to let the user make a clean stop of the training (instead of killing the job), and also the possibility of resetting the ANN weights to random values, to avoid local minima. Using MD, user can change parameters of this grid application while it is running. Other application that are already working with MD are: Air Pollution (crossgrid), Medical (Grid-based Approach for Virtual Arteries, crossgrid), Flood Management Applications (crossgrid), Air Pollution Modeling (crossgrid), simple Magic application use-case, Planned in the nearest future are: Visualization of Plasma in Fusion Reactors, GAMESS. Used technology Migrating Desktop bases on the Java applet technology. It can be launched using the Java Webstart technology or using a web browser with the appropriate Java Plug-in included in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). MD is based on Swing libraries for designing graphical user interface, Java CoG Kit version 1.2 is being used as an interface to Globus (for operation on proxy and GridFTP/FTP) functionality. Axis ver.1.2.1 web services client is used for communication with the Roaming Access Server. Migrating Desktop follows OSGi Service Platform specification version 4 (August 2005) and is based on the same plugin engine as Eclipse platform. Currently RAS for cooperation with EGEE infrastructure is using LCG2.7 and/or gLite 3.0 platform.
        Speaker: Marcin Plociennik (PSNC)
      • 17:00
        Rapid determination of Earthquake centroid moment tensor 20m
        This application, ported routinely on EGEE, is to provide first order informations on seismic source for large Earthquakes occuring worldwide. These informations are: the centroid, which corresponds to the location of the space-time barycenter of the rupture. In this demonstration some examples will be shown and the functionalities of LCG and gLite used.
        Speaker: Dr Eric CLEVEDE (CNRS/IPGP)
      • 17:00
        Supporting Parametric Study Workflow Applications by the P-GRADE Portal 20m
        The P-GRADE portal plays more and more important role in the life of various Grid user communities. After several successful demos at the biggest conferences and Grid user forums in Europe, Asia and the US, the representatives of several Grids and Grid based Virtual Organizations have approached us and requested to support their communities by the Portal. As a result, the P-GRADE portal is already the official portal of the VOCE (Virtual Organization Central Europe), HunGrid (Hungarian VO of EGEE) and the eGrid (Economic Grid) VOs of the EGEE Grid. It also provides service for the users of GILDA (the Grid training infrastructure of EGEE), Croatian Grid and Turkish Grid infrastructures. Moreover, the P-GRADE portal is the official portal of SEE-GRID which operates a Grid infrastructure in the South-East Europe region. Besides LCG-2 and gLite based production Grids the portal is successfully used as service for the GT2 based UK National Grid Service (NGS) and it was also successfully connected to the GT4 based Westfocus Grid (UK). Our latest achievement is that the P-GRADE Portal has been connected to the ARC middleware, thus now it is able to execute Grid applications in the Nordugrid too. After a successful demonstration at the Supercomputing'05 exhibition the representatives of the US Open Science Grid and Teragrid also expressed their interest to connect the portal to their Grid. Consequently, the P-GRADE Portal is now connected to both OSG and Teragrid, reaching the users of many large production Grid infrastructures of the World. Moreover, recently the GIN (Grid Interoperation/Interoperability Now) Grid of GGF is supported by the portal enabling the simultaneous access to all of its resources coming from different Grids. As P-GRADE portal becomes more and more popular among users we have received important feedbacks asking for new features of the portal. One of those requests was the support of parametric studies at the workflow level. The idea of parametric study applications is that the same workflow should be executed with a large number of different input data files. Moreover, different jobs must be fed by different number of files and the portal should be able to automatically generate the cross-product of these input files and run the workflow for each element of this cross-product. Obviously handling large number of workflows and files raises many new problems. Here we mention only some of them just to illustrate the problems: 1. Where to place and how to organize the necessary input files? 2. Where and how to store the output of each execution of the workflow? 3. How to prevent flooding the Grid and the portal by large parameter study applications? 4. How to specify the parametric study workflows in a way that simply extends the specification of normal workflows? 5. How to manage the large number of workflows by the portal? The main principles of supporting parametric study application by P-GRADE portal are as follows: 1. Any port of a PS-WF (parametric study workflow) can be used to feed many files to the WF. Such a port is called as PS-port and distinguished from the ordinary input ports both in the UI and in the inner representation of the WF. For each PS-port in a PS-WF there is a unique integer identifier (an ordering number starting from 0) generated by the portal. 2. A PS-port represents a set of input files that are stored in the same directory of a SE (storage element). It is the responsibility of the user to place these input files into the SE before submitting the PS-WF. Such a directory must not store any other files, only the input files belonging to the associated PS-port. 3. If there are several PS-ports in a PS-WF, then the portal RS (run-time system) takes care of producing the necessary cross-product of the input files of these PS-ports. 4. For each element of the cross-product the RS generates an executable WF (e-WF). The internal representation of an e-WF is the same as the normal WF. 5. Once the RS generated an e-WF it submits this e-WF in the same way as normal e-WFs are submitted (since they are the same). 6. The number (N) of e-WFs that are generated for parallel execution is the decision of the portal. When a PS-WF is submitted, the portal RS generates N e- WFs of the cross product and submit them simultaneously to the Grid. Once an e-WF is completed the portal RS generates the next element of the cross product and the related e-WF and submits it into the Grid. 7. An extra global parameter of a PS-WF is the target output directory of the workflow results. The target output directory must be in a SE. 8. Once an e-WF is completed the portal moves the zipped result into the target output directory. As a result not more than N partial WF results should be stored on the portal simultaneously for one PS-WF. Any post-processing of the results is the task of the user and not of the portal. 9. To avoid the flooding of the Grid and portal by a single user, one user can submit only one PS-WF at a time. The next one can be submitted if the previously submitted PS-WF is completed. Moreover, the portal administrator can set the maximum number of e-WFs that can be simultaneously generated from a single PS-WF as well as the maximum number of jobs that can be submitted by the portal to the Grid. During the demo of the portal we will demonstrate how the new PS support feature of P-GRADE portal works. We hope that this new feature will significantly increase the usability of the portal and will open doors for many new Grid user communities.
        Speakers: Peter Kacsuk (Prof.), Robert Lovas (Mr.)
      • 17:00
        The UNOSAT-GRID Project: Access to Satellite Imaginary Through the Grid Environment 20m
        The EGEE infrastructure is the largest production infrastructure (over 200 sites, more than 15,000 CPUs and about 9 PB storage). High-Energy Physics (notably the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN), Biomedical applications, Earth Observation, Computational Chemistry and Nuclear Fusion are depending on the EGEE infrastructure. The computational and storage capability of the Grid is attracting more scientific and innovative applications. In this contribution we would like to demonstrate the status of the EGEE-UNOSAT collaboration. UNOSAT is a United Nations activity to provide access to satellite imaginary and geographic system services for humanitarian operations to plan rescue or aid activities. UNOSAT is implemented by the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and managed by the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS). In addition, partners from public and private organizations constitute the UNOSAT consortium. Among these partners, CERN participates actively providing the computational and storage resources needed for their images analysis. Indeed through its partnership with CERN, UNOSAT is spearheading the use of Grid applications for access to the images and use of decentralized Geographic Information systems (GIS). Based on two successful CERN-UNOSAT pilot projects (data storage/compression/download and image access through mobile phone), UNOSAT is seeking to consolidate the considerable work undertaken so far in the present activity. The use case we would like to demonstrate is the delivery of satellite images from the Grid to a portal (web and portable devices). In particular, we would like to enable the selection and download of satellite images starting on a portable device (using the GPS coordinates provided by the device itself). The system provides seamless access to valuable satellite images while preserving the security requirements of the data provider and of the EGEE infrastructure (use of X509 certificates). The system uses EGEE services already used by other applications and our demo orchestrates them. The satellite images are catalogued by the AMGA (Metadata) and LFC (location) services. The handling of images (compression/decompression, cropping, etc…) is provided by the computational grid resources via the EGEE workload management system. This work is being performed in close collaboration with the NICE company, providing their EnginFrame technology (The technology used by Genius EGEE Grid portal as well, for a development and deployment environment for portal applications, with support for secure access to Grid resources and a powerful toolkit for application development). We believe that this project is extremely interesting for the UNOSAT community and the collaboration schema would also be very interesting as a model for other applications supported by EGEE II.
        Speakers: Mr Alberto Falzone (NICE (Italy)), Mr Daniel Lagrava Sandoval (CERN IT/PSS), Mr Jukka Antero Kommeri (CERN PH/UCM), Dr Patricia Mendez Lorenzo (CERN IT/PSS)
      • 17:00
        Using GridCC for Remote Operations of an Accelerator 20m
        Traditional developments in Grid technologies have concentrated on providing batch access to distributed computational and storage resources. The requirements to access, control, and acquire data from widely networked distributed instruments trigger the need to include a variety of new components. For instance, scientific equipment like sensors and probes are a need in nowadays Grid infrastructures. This, in turn, raises the need for supporting real-time operations and interactive work, thus opening a new frontier of research and development in this field. The GridCC Project, launched in September 2004 by the European Union, addresses these issues. The goal of GridCC is to exploit Grid opportunities for secure and collaborative work of distributed teams to remotely operate and monitor scientific equipment. In addition, GridCC will allow to exploit the Grid’s massive memory and computing resources for storing and processing data generated by this kind of equipment. In this talk we present first the status of the GridCC Project, focusing then on the real applications that have been equipped with our middleware. We have three main running use cases, from the run control of a high energy physics experiments, to the remote control and monitoring of a grid of small power generators and, finally, to the far remote operation of a particle accelerator. Other applications that have adopted our approach will be also presented; their field ranges from meteorology, to education, to the control of the territory (geo-hazard) and to the remote control and monitoring operations of telecommunication measurement equipment. Lastly, the integration with the gLite components will be highlighted, showing how the services’ orchestration through a workflow engine has been introduced. Our approach, based ontwo levels (namely, strict and loose) of guarantees to support and monitor the real-time and interactive requirements will be also shown.
        Speaker: Dr Roberto Pugliese (ELETTRA (Trieste))
    • 17:30 19:00
      Short Deadline Jobs Conf. Room 16

      Conf. Room 16

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
    • 09:00 10:30
      Plenary: EGEE Operations (SA1) and Keynote by Carol Goble Conf. Room 1

      Conf. Room 1

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 09:00
        The EGEE Production Grid: a Bird's-Eye View 45m
        The EGEE grid infrastructure has grown over the 30 months of EGEE and EGEE-II from around 40 sites to close to 200. It is now in daily use on a significant scale, and is acting as the primary source of computing and storage for several application communities. Although this growth has been impressive, with the LHC coming on-line a year from now the scale of resources and workload is expected to increase dramatically. This is an appropriate time to review the progress that has been made in building this large production grid facility, its relationship with other production grids, to summarize the outstanding issues, and to look forward to the problems and issues we may be facing in the future - both in the short term and on the slightly longer timescale.
        Speaker: Dr Ian Bird (CERN)
        Slides
      • 09:45
        e-Science is me-Science: What Scientists really want? 45m
        Over the past decade we have worked closely with Scientists - and specifically Life Sciences - to deliver systems and middleware to help solve their data management and integration problems. Its has been, and continues to be, an interesting learning experience. Most recently our myGrid project - which has produced the Taverna Workflow Workbench - has successfully bridged to the Bioinformatics community in that the Scientists have not only driven the developments but they have also adopted the technology that we have produced to do Science. So why did we succeed this time and how could we do better? What were the tipping points? How did we create (or not) the environment for adoption? What are the technical, social and political imperatives for true engagement with applications? Why are Life Scientists from Venus and Computer Scientists from Mars?
        Speaker: Dr Carole Goble (Univ. of Manchester)
        Slides
    • 10:30 11:00
      Coffee break 30m
    • 11:00 13:10
      Applications and User Support (NA4) Conf. Room 2

      Conf. Room 2

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 11:00
        Status and Challenges for NA4 25m
        An overview of the status of the NA4 activity followed by a description of the major challenges for the activity.
        Speaker: Dr Charles Loomis (LAL/Orsay)
        Slides
      • 11:25
        High-Energy Physics Applications 5m
        Status of HEP application sector.
        Speaker: Dr Massimo Lamanna (CERN)
        Slides
      • 11:30
        Biomedical Applications 5m
        Summary of biomedical application sector.
        Speaker: Vincent Jacques Breton (Laboratoire de Physique Corpusculaire (LPC))
        Slides
      • 11:35
        Earth Science Applications 5m
        Summary of Earth Science application sector.
        Speaker: Dr Monique Petitdidier (IPSL)
        Slides
      • 11:40
        Status of Fusion Applications 5m
        Status of the Fusion application sector.
        Speaker: Dr Francisco Castejon (CIEMAT)
        Slides
      • 11:45
        Status of Computational Chemistry Applications 5m
        Summary of computational chemistry application sector.
        Speaker: Dr Osvaldo Gervasi (Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Perugia)
        Slides
      • 11:50
        Status of Astrophysics Applications 5m
        Summary of astrophysics and astroparticle physics sector.
        Speaker: Dr Claudio Vuerli (INAF-SI)
        Slides
      • 11:55
        GILDA t-Infrastructure 5m
        Status of the GILDA t-Infrastructure.
        Speaker: Roberto Barbera (UNIV. CATANIA AND INFN)
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Discussion 30m
        Open discussion concerning the points raised in the summary talks or other concern or suggestions from NA4 participants.
    • 11:00 12:35
      Central Europe Federation Conf. Room 15

      Conf. Room 15

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 11:20
        JRA1 (CESNET) 10m
        Slides
      • 11:30
        NA2 activities 15m
        1 presentation per each country involved 2-3 minutes each
        Slides
      • 11:45
        EGEE II management information 5m
        Slides
      • 11:50
        EGI and NGIs 20m
        Presentation and discussion about the Sustainable Grid Infrastructure/Initiative and the conditions and requirements in the CE region
      • 12:10
        WLCG vs. EGEE II 10m
        results of the Service Challenge 4 Cyfronet
      • 12:20
        Procedures for Incident response 15m
    • 11:00 12:30
      Certification & Testing (SA3): SA3 Conf. Room 3

      Conf. Room 3

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      In the given time we have to focus on a few core
      aspects.

      1) Presentation of the restructured configuration
      management

      2) Status of the testing activity

      3) Update of the status of the partner contributions

      4) Discussion of next steps

      • 11:00
        New YAIM model 10m
        The evolution of YAIM
        Speaker: Robert Harakaly (CERN)
        Slides
      • 11:10
        Certification testbed architecture 10m
        Slides
      • 11:20
        Test overview, writing and specific 20m
        Speaker: Mr Andreas Unterkircher (CERN)
        Slides
      • 11:40
        Batch system adaptation SGE 10m
        Speaker: Carlos Borrego Iglesias (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid)
        Slides
      • 11:50
        gLite-Unicore interoperability 10m
        Speaker: Daniel Johannes Mallmann
        Slides
      • 12:00
        gLite-KnowARC interopability 10m
        Speaker: Peter Stefan (Unknown)
        Slides
      • 12:10
        Status of the porting activities 10m
        Speaker: John Walsh (Unknown)
        Slides
      • 12:20
        Discussion 10m
    • 11:00 12:30
      Grid Operations Centre Database Advisory Group Conf. Room 11

      Conf. Room 11

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Discussions on GOCDB Requirements and Work Plan

      CLOSED MEETING

    • 11:00 12:30
      Industry Quality Standards Conf. Room 7+8

      Conf. Room 7+8

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This session is dedicated to the presentation of concrete
      experiences and benefits of the implementation of QA
      standards such us ITIL,CMMi,ISO.

      • 11:00
        QA standards overview and Serono implementation choices and benefits 45m
        The first part of the presentation will introduce QA standards such as : - Service Management (ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000-1/-2:2005) - CMMi - Quality Management ISO 9001, - Security Management ISO 2700 The second part will present Serono implementation choices and benefits
        Speaker: Mr Serge Thorn (Serono International - Director IT Research & Innovation)
        Slides
        • (no title) 15m
      • 11:45
        Questions 10m
      • 11:55
        The benefits of implementing ITIL for GEANT Network Operation Center (NOC) 25m
        The GÉANT network is a pan-European backbone which connects Europe's national research and education networks. EGEE is built on GEANT network. CSSI as industrial contractor is responsible for the operation management of the Network Operation Center (NOC). The presentation will highlight the benefits of implementing ITIL for GEANT NOC.
        Speaker: Mr Silvère Pradella (CSSI - GEANT NOC Manager)
        Slides
      • 12:20
        Questions 10m
    • 11:00 12:30
      Northen Federation Conf. Room 16

      Conf. Room 16

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      Public Relations Workshop Conf. Room 18

      Conf. Room 18

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Minimizing Misunderstanding: How the media deal with
      scientists



      The world of the media is very different to that of science,
      but it does work on a
      logical set of rules and behaviors, however obscure they
      might be to those
      outside of the media. In this session, journalists will
      present how the media
      operates to help researchers, scientists and developers to
      have better relations
      with journalists. It will cover both how to respond to being
      approached by
      journalists, and how to approach journalists themselves.

      The session will be introduced by members of the NA2
      (Dissemination, Outreach
      and Communication) activity, followed by a talk by a
      professional writer and
      journalists, and finally a panel discussions with a members
      of the media, NA2
      and NA3 (Training) activities.

      • 11:00
        Introduction: Why Communicate 15m
        A short introduction to the session, explaining why communication is a key issue for EGEE and other projects.
        Speaker: Mr Owen Appleton (EGEE)
        Slides
      • 11:15
        How to approach the media and how to deal with them approaching you. 40m
        This talk, given by a professional writer and ex-journalist working on issues surrounding the Grid, is intended to make it easier for members of the community to deal with the press. By understanding how the press operates, delegates should find it easier to approach the media with stories, and how to react when the media approaches them.
        Speaker: Ms Gillian Law (NESC)
      • 11:55
        Panel discussion: dealing with the Media 35m
        This session will feature a panel discussion with members of the dissemination and training activities within the project, grid journalists and professional writers on issues relating to the media. The members will answer questions from the floor, or questions can be submitted in advance to owen.appleton@cern.ch with ‘PR Question’ in the title field.
        Speaker: Mr Owen Appleton (EGEE)
    • 11:00 12:30
      South-East Europe Federation (SAs) Conf. Room 4

      Conf. Room 4

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This is open to the SEE Federation members from the 7
      countries (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Romania,
      Serbia, Turkey) with effort in the Service Activities
      focusing mainly on SA1 and secondly on SA3. The
      coordination
      of the federation efforts in those activities will be
      discussed.

    • 11:00 12:30
      South-West Europe Federation (SAs) Conf. Room 17

      Conf. Room 17

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      (Closed meeting)

    • 11:00 12:30
      UK/Ireland Federation Conf. Room 13

      Conf. Room 13

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This session is open to all from the UK-Ireland
      Federation
      working on (or interested in) EGEE and will provide a
      forum for
      discussion of UK/I specific issues. There will be an
      opportunity for a few short talks.

      • 11:00
        EGEE and NGS 20m
        Slides
      • 11:20
        Current technical issues in UK/I 40m
        Slides
      • 12:00
        General discussion 30m
        Slides
    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m
    • 14:00 15:30
      Asia Federation Conf. Room 11

      Conf. Room 11

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      14-15.30

      Speakers:
      TWGrid: The Grid and e-Science Global Infrastructure in
      Taiwan”
      Eric Yen, ASGC, Taiwan

      “National Grid in Singapore - Moving Forward”
      Hing-yan Lee, National Grid Office, Singapore

      Title: TBA
      Glenn Moloney, University of Melbourne, Australia

      "GRID Research and Application in Malaysia: Leveraging
      on Malaysian Research and Education Network (MYREN)
      connectivity with TransEurasian Information Network
      and ASEAN NRENs."

      Suhaimi Napis, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
      16-17.30
      Speakers:
      “Grid Activities in Korea”
      Jae-Hyuck Kwak, KISTI, Korea

      “The State of Grid Computing in Vietnam, and Which
      Aims the VNGrid Project Want to Reach”
      Tran Van Lang, HCMC Institute of Information
      Technology, Vietnam

      Panel discussion: Facilitating Sustainable e-
      Infrastructure in Asia

      • 14:00
        TWGrid: The Grid and e-Science Global Infrastructure in Taiwan 20m
        Speaker: Mr Eric Yen (ASGC, Taiwan)
        Slides
      • 14:20
        National Grid in Singapore - Moving Forward 20m
        Speaker: Mr Hing-yan Lee (National Grid Office, Singapore)
        Slides
      • 14:40
        The Australian National Grid Program 20m
        Speaker: Dr Glenn Moloney (UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        GRID Research and Application in Malaysia: Leveraging on Malaysian Research and Education Network (MYREN) connectivity with TransEurasian Information Network and ASEAN NRENs. 20m
        Speaker: Mr Suhaimi Napis (Universiti Putra Malaysia)
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Grid Operations (SA1) Conf. Room 3

      Conf. Room 3

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Presentation to SA1 of some important issues in the
      project.

      • 14:00
        Status of the pre-production service 30m
        How is it working, what are the outstanding issues?
        Speaker: Nicholas Thackray (CERN)
        Slides
      • 14:30
        SFT/SAm monitoring 30m
        Clarify the stratgey, status, what is missing? Does this look like SLAs? What about the rest of the metrics programme - we need people to work on that.
        Speaker: Piotr Nyczyk (CERN)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        VO Resource allocation process 30m
        Presentation of the process that has been agreed in the PEB/PMB. What is expected from the sites now?
        Speaker: Maite Barroso Lopez (CERN)
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Industry Quality Standards Conf. Room 7+8

      Conf. Room 7+8

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      This session is dedicated to the presentation of concrete
      experiences and benefits of the implementation of QA
      standards such us ITIL,CMMi,ISO.

      • 14:00
        Key elements for building an IT service quality model 30m
        The presentation will focus on lessons learnt and experience sharing for building IT services based on ITIL and Sun Operations Management Capabilities Model (OMCM)
        Speaker: Mr Jean-Francois Milhomme (Sun Micro Systems - Solution Architect)
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Questions 10m
      • 14:40
        CMMi level 3 certification process within Enginneering Ingegneria Informatica 30m
        The presentation will cover: - QA certification in Enginneering, reasons and objectives, - How Engineering applied QA CMMi certification to its complex organisational model (a group of 13th companies, involved in several markets from bank and finance to utility and defense, with several distinct technologies). - the concrete process followed in getting the certification.
        Speaker: Mr Gabriele Ruffatti (Enginneering Ingegneria Informatica - Director of Research and Innovation dept)
        Slides
      • 15:10
        Questions 10m
      • 15:20
        Overall questions 10m
    • 14:00 15:30
      Middleware Security Group Conf. Room 16

      Conf. Room 16

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Goal with the meeting:


      Update on current global security architecture work.


      Discuss future global security architecture work.

      List of delegates
      pictures
      • 14:00
        Update on EGEE MW security 10m
        Update on EGEE MW security - this is covered in more detail at the JRA1 sessions at the conference.
        Slides
      • 14:10
        VOMS update including host Certificate in User's Proxy VOMS credentials 25m
        Slides
      • 14:35
        MyProxy and VOMS: user credentials and host credentials 25m
        Slides
      • 15:00
        GridSite Delegation and gLite for SSSS 20m
        GridSite Delegation -- progress report in FTS and SRM
        gLite library for Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme
        Slides
      • 15:20
        gLite Java Authorisation Framework (gJAF) and authorisation policy coordination issues 10m
        Slides
    • 14:00 15:30
      Network Activities (NA2, NA3, NA4) Conf. Room 4

      Conf. Room 4

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      The first part of the session will be devoted to the User
      Information
      Group, whose remit is to provide EGEE users with
      accurate, up-to-date information on using EGEE. We will
      review the mandate for the UIG and look at examples
      of
      how we intend to present the material. This will be
      followed by an open discussion.

      The second part of the sesion will be devoted to other
      matters of common interest to NA2/3/4

      • 14:00
        Introduction to UIG 30m
        An overview of the history of the User Information Group in EGEE, its purpose and its limitations. A summary of progress made so far in EGEE-II, and an outline of future plans for the activities of the group.
        Speaker: Dr Brendan HAMILL (NeSC, University of Edinburgh)
        Slides
      • 14:30
        Progress on first user scenarios 30m
        This contribution will describe progress to date on the first group of user scenarios which will comprise the output of the user Information group in EGEE-II. These are intended to provide easy, user-friendly access to user information covering EGEE operations from beginner to advanced user level.
        Speaker: Stephen Burke (RAL)
        Slides
      • 15:00
        Relationship between UIG and provision of training material 30m
        Speaker: Mike Mineter (University of Edinburgh)
        Slides
    • 15:30 16:00
      Coffee break 30m
    • 16:00 17:30
      Asia Federation Conf. Room 11

      Conf. Room 11

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      14-15.30

      Speakers:
      TWGrid: The Grid and e-Science Global Infrastructure in
      Taiwan”
      Eric Yen, ASGC, Taiwan

      “National Grid in Singapore - Moving Forward”
      Hing-yan Lee, National Grid Office, Singapore

      Title: TBA
      Glenn Moloney, University of Melbourne, Australia

      "GRID Research and Application in Malaysia: Leveraging
      on Malaysian Research and Education Network (MYREN)
      connectivity with TransEurasian Information Network
      and ASEAN NRENs."

      Suhaimi Napis, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
      16-17.30
      Speakers:
      “Grid Activities in Korea”
      Jae-Hyuck Kwak, KISTI, Korea

      “The State of Grid Computing in Vietnam, and Which
      Aims the VNGrid Project Want to Reach”
      Tran Van Lang, HCMC Institute of Information
      Technology, Vietnam

      Panel discussion: Facilitating Sustainable e-
      Infrastructure in Asia

      • 16:00
        Grid Activities in Korea 20m
        Speaker: Mr Jae-Hyuck Kwak Kwak (KISTI, Korea)
        Slides
      • 16:20
        The State of Grid Computing in Vietnam, and Which Aims the VNGrid Project Want to Reach 20m
        Speaker: Mr Tran Van Lang (HCMC Institute of Information Technology, Vietnam)
        Slides
      • 16:40
        Panel discussion: Facilitating Sustainable e- Infrastructure in Asia 20m
    • 16:00 17:50
      Grid Operations (SA1) Conf. Room 3

      Conf. Room 3

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Presentation to SA1 of some important issues in the
      project.

      • 16:00
        Software process overview 30m
        A description of the new software process, to inform SA1 and site managers how this now works.
        Speaker: Mr Laurence Field (CERN)
      • 16:30
        Technical strategy - the TCG and EMT 30m
        Present to SA1 how the technical decisions are made in the project and what are the respective roles of the TCG and EMT.
      • 17:00
        Deployment roadmap for the next year 20m
        What should we expect in the coming year: services, developments, tools for management and configuration etc.
        Speaker: Dr Ian Bird (CERN)
        Slides
      • 17:20
        Update on operational procedures 20m
        Speaker: Philipa Strange (Unknown)
    • 16:00 17:50
      Industry Task Force Conf. Room 18

      Conf. Room 18

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      (Closed meeting to Industrial Applications
      using or
      intending to use gLite).




      The EGEE-II Industrial Task Force (ITF) brings together
      the industrial partners of EGEE-II and related projects
      with industry/business focus.

      This meeting is focussed on application needs with
      topics such us:

      • Application goals; Organisation
      • What are the gLite functionalities that are important for your application?
      • What are the features missing in gLite? (If you already know)
      • Will you use an external testbed or will you prefer to use EGEE resources?
      • Timescale
      • Needs for training and support
      • Any other points for the discussion at the end of the session
      • 16:00
        Industry Task Force (ITF) presentation 10m
        Overview, objectives and general aim of ITF
        Speaker: Stefano Beco (Datamat S.p.A.)
        Slides
      • 16:10
        BEinGRID project and associated gLite experiments 25m
        General project Presentation 10' Experiments using gLite: - BE07- Earth Observation 5' - BE11- Risk management 5' - BE18 - Seismic imaging and reservoir simulation (EGEODE) 5'
        Speakers: BEs' leaders , Csilla Zsigri (ATOS)
        • BEinGRID general presentation 10m
          Speaker: Ms Csilla Zsigri (ATOS)
          Slides
        • BE07- Earth Observation 5m
          Speaker: Mr Antonio TABESCO (GMV)
        • BE11 Risk Management 5m
          Speaker: Ms Helene Huard (ECP-CRSA)
          Slides
        • BE18 - Seismic imaging and reservoir simulation 5m
          Speaker: Mr Gaël Youinou (CGG)
          Slides
      • 16:35
        CHISTERA project 10m
        CNES intranet Grid Prototype conducted by CS SI Goals and needs.
        Speaker: Mr Joel Courquet (CS SI)
        Slides
      • 16:45
        TOTAL UK project 10m
        Speaker: Mrs Hannah CUMMING (TOTAL UK)
        Slides
      • 16:55
        Health-e-Child project 5m
        Speaker: David Manset (Maat-GKnowledge)
        Slides
      • 17:05
        CYCLOPS 5m
        Speaker: Lorenzo Bigagli (CNR IMAA)
        Slides
      • 17:10
        Discussions 25m
        A member from the EGEE Technical Coordination Group (TCG) & representative of SA1, JRA, NA3 will be present for active participation
    • 16:00 17:30
      Middleware Security Group Conf. Room 16

      Conf. Room 16

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Goal with the meeting:


      Update on current global security architecture work.


      Discuss future global security architecture work.

      List of delegates
      pictures
    • 16:00 17:30
      Network Activities (NA2, NA3, NA4) Conf. Room 4

      Conf. Room 4

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      The first part of the session will be devoted to the User
      Information
      Group, whose remit is to provide EGEE users with
      accurate, up-to-date information on using EGEE. We will
      review the mandate for the UIG and look at examples
      of
      how we intend to present the material. This will be
      followed by an open discussion.

      The second part of the sesion will be devoted to other
      matters of common interest to NA2/3/4

    • 19:00 22:30
      Conference Dinner 3h 30m
    • 09:00 10:30
      Plenary: EGEE Middleware (JRA1) and Keynote by Dave Snelling Conf. Room 1

      Conf. Room 1

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 09:00
        EGEE Middleware 45m
        With the release of gLite 3.0 EGEE reached the important milestone to converge to a unique middleware stack. gLite 3.0 is the merge of the LCG middleware (LCG 2.7.0) that was deployed on the production infrastructure and of the EGEE middleware (gLite 1.5) developed in the first phase of the project. This was done following the new software process that foresees the Technical Coordination Group as the driving body, the new integration and certification process controlled by the SA3 activity and the use of the tools provided by the ETICS project. In this presentation an overview of the gLite 3.0 middleware and of the new software process is given. Furthermore the future development plans and the collaborations with other projects are discussed.
        Speaker: Claudio Grandi (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN))
        Slides
      • 09:45
        Standards for Web Service Grid Infrastructure 45m
        Some aspects of standards based Web Service Grids are now stable, e.g. WS-Addressing, WS-Security, others are still in flux, in particular the the extended infrastructure related specifications needed for grids and management. Although the notion of stateful resources has been widely accepted by most segments of the community, the details of it's rendering are still evolving. In this talk we look at this stable set of concepts and the current status of standards development for them.
        Speaker: Dr David Snelling (Fujitsu)
        Slides
    • 10:30 11:00
      Coffee break 30m
    • 11:00 12:30
      Administrative Federation Committee (AFC) Conf. Room 3

      Conf. Room 3

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Closed meeting of the administrative federation
      representatives to discuss administrative issues of
      EGEE and EGEE-II

    • 11:00 12:30
      Grid Middleware (JRA1) Conf. Room 13

      Conf. Room 13

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      JRA1 internal activity meeting. We will discuss the main
      changes since the last JAR1 All Hands meeting in Pilsen.
      There will be short reports form the cluster managers.

      • 11:00
        Introduction 5m
        Speaker: John White White (Helsinki Institute of Physics HIP)
        Slides
      • 11:05
        Security 15m
        Speaker: John White
        Slides
      • 11:20
        WMS & CE 15m
        Speaker: Francesco Prelz (Unknown)
        Slides
      • 11:35
        LB & JP 10m
        Speaker: Mr Ales Krenek (MASARYK UNIVERSITY, BRNO, CZECH REPUBLIC)
        Slides
      • 11:45
        Data Management 15m
        Speaker: David Smith (CERN)
        Slides
      • 12:00
        Information 10m
        Speaker: Dr Steve Fisher (RAL)
      • 12:10
        Preview testbed 20m
        Speaker: Luigi Zangrando
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      Mini User Forum Conf. Room 2

      Conf. Room 2

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
      • 11:00
        Mini User Forum: introduction 5m
        Speaker: Dr Massimo Lamanna (CERN)
      • 11:05
        Data Access: setting the scene 10m
        Speakers: James Casey (CERN), Jean-Philippe Baud (CERN)
        Slides
      • 11:15
        Users experience in data access (HEP) 15m
        Speaker: Dietrich Liko (CERN)
        Slides
      • 11:30
        Users experience in data access (Earth Sciences) 15m
        Speakers: Dr Horst Schwichtenberg (SCAI Fraunhofer Institute), Dr Kerstin Ronneberger (Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum GmbH)
        Slides
      • 11:45
        Users experience in data access (Life Sciences) 15m
        Speaker: Dr Johan Montagnat (CNRS)
        Slides
      • 12:00
        LCG 3D database replication infrastructure 15m
        Speaker: Dr Dirk Duellmann Duellmann (CERN IT/DB & LCG POOL PROJECT)
        Slides
      • 12:15
        SRM status and plans 15m
        Speaker: Maarten Litmaath (CERN)
        Slides
    • 11:00 12:30
      Regional Operations Centers Meeting (SA1 ROC) Conf. Room 17

      Conf. Room 17

      CICG

      CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

      Regular internal meeting of the SA1 ROC
      managers.
      At
      these meetings the ROC managers make decisions
      on:

    • escalated operational issues
    • ;
    • proposed
      improvements/additions to operations procedures;
    • etc.
agenda
slides
  • 11:00 12:30
    Seegrid Regional Grids Workshop Conf. Room 4

    Conf. Room 4

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    SEE-GRID-2 project, in cooperation with EGEE, is
    organising a concertation workshop for the regional
    eInfrastructure projects. The aim of the workshop is to
    exchange experiences regarding a number of horizontal
    topics, including infrastructure operations, applications,
    training, as well as sustainability. All current regional
    projects will be represented, and a set of short panels
    and presentations will address the above issues.

    agenda
  • 11:00 12:45
    Swiss Grid Initiative: Launch of the Swiss Grid Initiative Conf. Room 15

    Conf. Room 15

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    The aim is twofold:

    1. Promotion of Grid projects with Swiss involvement,
    making the projects known to each other and to the
    wider community, as a basis to find synergies in the
    Swiss Grid landscape

    2. Unveiling the Swiss Grid Initiative as a supporting
    organization, representing the interests of the Swiss
    Grid community, promoting its goals and defining its
    focus. Building a Swiss Grid community with the Swiss
    Grid Initiative as the supporting umbrella. The Swiss
    Grid Initiative will have to represent the Swiss Grid
    community towards international bodies and the EU so
    it should be formed properly with all interested parties
    involved.

    In addition, of course the EGEE community may learn
    about the Swiss Grid activities and vice versa. Visit also
    The Swiss Grid
    Initiative Website

    • 11:00
      GRIDs in Drug Discovery and Knowledge Management 20m
      Speaker: Prof. Manuel Peitsch (Novartis)
      Slides
    • 11:20
      The Swiss Grid Initiative 20m
      Speaker: Dr Peter Kunszt (CSCS)
      Slides
    • 11:40
      EUResearch Switzerland 20m
      Speakers: Mr Alex Waehry (EUResearch), Mr Patrick Furrer (EUResearch)
      Slides
    • 12:00
      SWITCH's Grid Activities 20m
      Speaker: Christoph Witzig (SWITCH)
      Slides
    • 12:20
      DISCUSSION 25m
      Slides
  • 11:00 12:30
    Technical Network Liaison Committee Conf. Room 18

    Conf. Room 18

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    This closed session is the place of the first Technical
    Network Liaison Committee (TNLC) of EGEE-II. It is
    dedicated to the relations between EGEE and the
    network providers. As such, it gathers a limited number
    of people from SA2 (the networking activity of EGEE)
    and from the NRENs.



    If you think you are interested in attending this
    meeting, please ask the convener about the
    opportunity of your participation.

    Minutes
    • 11:00
      Status of the EGEE Network Operational Centre (ENOC) 15m
      Current status of the ENOC, remaining issues and future plans
      Speaker: Mathieu GOUTELLE (CNRS/UREC)
      Slides
    • 11:15
      Presentation of the GÉANT2 End-to-End Coordination Unit 15m
      Speaker: Toby Rodwell (Dante)
      Slides
    • 11:30
      The LHC Optical Private Network 15m
      Requirements of LCG, startup, runtime
      Speaker: David Foster (CERN)
      Slides
    • 11:45
      Discussions 45m
  • 12:30 14:00
    Lunch 1h 30m
  • 14:00 15:30
    EGEE-II Project Management Board (PMB) Conf. Room 7+8

    Conf. Room 7+8

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    (Closed session)

    agenda
  • 14:00 15:30
    Financial helpdesk Conf. Room 11

    Conf. Room 11

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
  • 14:00 15:30
    Grid Operations Security (SA1) Conf. Room 3

    Conf. Room 3

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    This session will present the current status and future
    plans of SA1 security activities to the wider SA1
    community. This is to inform SA1 and to invite feedback
    and discussion. Participation by representatives from
    other Grid infrastructures and projects will be welcome.

    • 14:00
      Operational Security Coordination Team (OSCT) 40m
      Status and plans of OSCT
      Speaker: Ian Neilson (CERN)
      Slides
    • 14:40
      Post Mortem of Proxy generation tools vulnerability 10m
      Speaker: Mr Romain Wartel (CERN)
      Slides
    • 14:50
      Grid Security Vulnerability Group (GSVG) 40m
      Status and plans for GSVG
      Speaker: Linda Ann Cornwall (RAL)
      Slides
  • 14:00 15:30
    Mini User Forum Conf. Room 2

    Conf. Room 2

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
    • 14:00
      Catalogues: status and plans 15m
      Speaker: David Smith (CERN)
    • 14:15
      D I S C U S S I O N 40m
    • 14:55
      Wrap-up 10m
    • 15:05
      Workflows in EGEE: Setting the scene 5m
      Speaker: Dr Harald Kornmayer (FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM KARLSRUHE (FZK))
    • 15:10
      BPEL: Orchestrating web services (part 1) 20m
      BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is a standard promoted by most leading vendors for orchestrating discrete (web) services into end-to-end business processes. BPEL has built-in support for synchronous and asynchronous activities, XML manipulation, parallel processing, conditional branching, exception management, compensating transactions and non-structured events. This presentation will explain BPEL using practical examples and demonstrations
      Speaker: Hugo Brand (Oracle)
  • 14:00 15:30
    Regional Operations Centers Meeting (SA1 ROC) Conf. Room 17

    Conf. Room 17

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    Regular internal meeting of the SA1 ROC
    managers.
    At
    these meetings the ROC managers make decisions
    on:

  • escalated operational issues
  • ;
  • proposed
    improvements/additions to operations procedures;
  • etc.
  • agenda
    slides
  • 14:00 15:30
    Seegrid Regional Grids Workshop Conf. Room 4

    Conf. Room 4

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    SEE-GRID-2 project, in cooperation with EGEE, is
    organising a concertation workshop for the regional
    eInfrastructure projects. The aim of the workshop is to
    exchange experiences regarding a number of horizontal
    topics, including infrastructure operations, applications,
    training, as well as sustainability. All current regional
    projects will be represented, and a set of short panels
    and presentations will address the above issues.

    agenda
  • 14:00 15:30
    Swiss Grid Initiative: Grid Projects and Research in Switzerland I Conf. Room 15

    Conf. Room 15

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    The aim is twofold:

    1. Promotion of Grid projects with Swiss involvement,
    making the projects known to each other and to the
    wider community, as a basis to find synergies in the
    Swiss Grid landscape

    2. Unveiling the Swiss Grid Initiative as a supporting
    organization, representing the interests of the Swiss
    Grid community, promoting its goals and defining its
    focus. Building a Swiss Grid community with the Swiss
    Grid Initiative as the supporting umbrella. The Swiss
    Grid Initiative will have to represent the Swiss Grid
    community towards international bodies and the EU so
    it should be formed properly with all interested parties
    involved.

    In addition, of course the EGEE community may learn
    about the Swiss Grid activities and vice versa. Visit also
    The Swiss Grid
    Initiative Website

    • 14:00
      Swiss Bio Grid: Dengue In Silico Drug Discovery and Protogrid 15m
      Speakers: Dr Michael Podvinec (University of Basel), Prof. Torsten Schwede (University of Basel)
      Slides
    • 14:15
      Swiss Bio Grid: Proteomics Project 15m
      Speaker: Dr Patricia Hernandez (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Geneva)
      Slides
    • 14:30
      Intelligent Scheduler 15m
      Speaker: Kevin Cristiano (Ecole d'ingénieurs et d'architectes de Fribourg)
      Slides
    • 14:45
      SEPAC 15m
      Speaker: Dr Sergio Maffioletti (CSCS)
      Slides
    • 15:00
      The LHC Computing Grid 15m
      Speaker: Dr Derek Feichtinger
      Slides
    • 15:15
      Condor Grid at EPFL 15m
      Speaker: Michaela Thiemard (EPFL)
      Slides
  • 14:00 15:30
    Technical Network Liaison Committee Conf. Room 18

    Conf. Room 18

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    This closed session is the place of the first Technical
    Network Liaison Committee (TNLC) of EGEE-II. It is
    dedicated to the relations between EGEE and the
    network providers. As such, it gathers a limited number
    of people from SA2 (the networking activity of EGEE)
    and from the NRENs.



    If you think you are interested in attending this
    meeting, please ask the convener about the
    opportunity of your participation.

    Minutes
    • 14:00
      Network Service Level Agreement (SLA) Implementation 45m
      Plans to use SLAs on the applications side and how to collaborate with NRENs about this
      Speaker: Vasiliki Pouli
    • 14:45
      NREN Trouble Ticket normalization 45m
      First thoughts, gathering of EGEE/grid requirements
      Speakers: Mathieu GOUTELLE (CNRS/UREC), Toby Rodwell (Dante)
      Slides
  • 15:30 16:00
    Coffee break 30m
  • 16:00 19:00
    Central European Regional Operations Center Meeting (CE-ROC) Conf. Room 17

    Conf. Room 17

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    http://egee.grid.cyfronet.pl/events-in-roc ....

    Please - the agenda of the session can be found there.

  • 16:00 19:00
    EGEE-II Project Management Board (PMB) Conf. Room 7+8

    Conf. Room 7+8

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    (Closed session)

    agenda
  • 16:00 17:30
    Financial helpdesk Conf. Room 11

    Conf. Room 11

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
  • 16:00 17:40
    Global Grid User Support (SA1 GGUS) Conf. Room 16

    Conf. Room 16

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
    • 16:00
      User Support in EGEE 20m
      Speaker: Torsten Antoni (Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe)
      Slides
    • 16:20
      The GGUS system 20m
      Speaker: Guenter Grein (Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe)
      Slides
    • 16:40
      The GGUS supporters 10m
      Speaker: Diana Bosio (CERN)
      Slides
    • 16:50
      Training for supporters 10m
      Speaker: Mario David (LIP)
      Slides
    • 17:00
      Discussion 30m
  • 16:00 17:30
    Grid Operations Security (SA1) Conf. Room 3

    Conf. Room 3

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    This session will present the current status and future
    plans of SA1 security activities to the wider SA1
    community. This is to inform SA1 and to invite feedback
    and discussion. Participation by representatives from
    other Grid infrastructures and projects will be welcome.

    • 16:00
      Joint Security Policy Group (JSPG) 1h
      Status and plans for new and updated policy documents.
      Speaker: Dr David Kelsey (RAL)
      Slides
    • 17:00
      OSG VO policies 30m
      Thinking about Security. Working outwards from GLexec.
      Speaker: Don Petravick (FNAL)
      Slides
  • 16:00 17:50
    Mini User Forum Conf. Room 2

    Conf. Room 2

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland
    • 16:00
      BPEL: Orchestrating web services (part 2) 20m
      BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is a standard promoted by most leading vendors for orchestrating discrete (web) services into end-to-end business processes. BPEL has built-in support for synchronous and asynchronous activities, XML manipulation, parallel processing, conditional branching, exception management, compensating transactions and non-structured events. This presentation will explain BPEL using practical examples and demonstrations
      Speaker: Hugo Brand (Oracle)
    • 16:20
      Workflows: Experience from applications 45m
      • Biomed experience: Johan Montagnat
      • The Knowledge-based Workflow System for Grid Applications: Marian Babik
      • Biomed experience 15m
        Speaker: Dr Johan Montagnat (CNRS)
        Slides
      • The Knowledge-based Workflow System for Grid Applications 15m
        Speaker: Marian Babik (Kosice Technical University)
        Slides
    • 17:05
      D I S C U S S I O N 25m
    • 17:30
      Wrap-up 20m
      Speaker: Dr Harald Kornmayer (FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM KARLSRUHE (FZK))
  • 16:00 18:10
    Seegrid Regional Grids Workshop Conf. Room 4

    Conf. Room 4

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    SEE-GRID-2 project, in cooperation with EGEE, is
    organising a concertation workshop for the regional
    eInfrastructure projects. The aim of the workshop is to
    exchange experiences regarding a number of horizontal
    topics, including infrastructure operations, applications,
    training, as well as sustainability. All current regional
    projects will be represented, and a set of short panels
    and presentations will address the above issues.

    agenda
  • 16:00 17:30
    Swiss Grid Initiative: Grid Projects and Research in Switzerland II Conf. Room 15

    Conf. Room 15

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    The aim is twofold:

    1. Promotion of Grid projects with Swiss involvement,
    making the projects known to each other and to the
    wider community, as a basis to find synergies in the
    Swiss Grid landscape

    2. Unveiling the Swiss Grid Initiative as a supporting
    organization, representing the interests of the Swiss
    Grid community, promoting its goals and defining its
    focus. Building a Swiss Grid community with the Swiss
    Grid Initiative as the supporting umbrella. The Swiss
    Grid Initiative will have to represent the Swiss Grid
    community towards international bodies and the EU so
    it should be formed properly with all interested parties
    involved.

    In addition, of course the EGEE community may learn
    about the Swiss Grid activities and vice versa. Visit also
    The Swiss Grid
    Initiative Website

    • 16:00
      Grid Computing for Computational Chemistry and Beyond 15m
      Speaker: Dr Wibke Sudholt (University of Zurich)
      Slides
    • 16:15
      Chemistry Grids 15m
      Speaker: Dr Andreas Bach (ETHZ)
      Slides
    • 16:30
      CoreGrid: The unique European NoE for Grid and P2P technologies 15m
      Speaker: Prof. Pierre Kuonen (Ecole d'ingénieurs et d'architectes de Fribourg)
      Slides
    • 16:45
      KnowARC 15m
      Speaker: Dr Henning Mueller (University of Geneva)
      Slides
    • 17:00
      Grid Workflows: JOpera and SODIUM project 15m
      Speaker: Dr Cesare Pautasso (ETHZ)
      Slides
    • 17:15
      DILIGENT 15m
      Speaker: Prof. Heiko Schuldt (University of Basel)
      Slides
  • 16:00 17:30
    Technical Network Liaison Committee Conf. Room 18

    Conf. Room 18

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    This closed session is the place of the first Technical
    Network Liaison Committee (TNLC) of EGEE-II. It is
    dedicated to the relations between EGEE and the
    network providers. As such, it gathers a limited number
    of people from SA2 (the networking activity of EGEE)
    and from the NRENs.



    If you think you are interested in attending this
    meeting, please ask the convener about the
    opportunity of your participation.

    Minutes
    • 16:00
      NREN Trouble Ticket normalization 1h 30m
      First thoughts, gathering of EGEE/grid requirements
  • 17:30 19:00
    Public Relations Workshop Conf. Room 18

    Conf. Room 18

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    Effective communication: How to present your work in
    technical articles and presentations


    Researchers and scientists are very used to
    communicating within their interest groups, but it can be
    more complex when producing material for those outside of
    your project or field. This session will give guidance on
    two ways for presenting material. The first part of the
    session will be on how to produce and give presentations
    with guidance on how to fit your talk to your audience, and
    how to stop them falling asleep! The second part of the
    session will cover how to plan and write articles for
    magazines and newspapers that will be clear and readable
    while also conveying your key messages. The session will end
    with a Q&A session with the two presenters.

    • 17:30
      Giving Presentations 30m
      This talk will give guidance on how to give presentations to general audiences. It will include advice both how to plan the presentation and how to give it.
      Speaker: Hannelore Hammerle (Unknown)
      Slides
    • 18:00
      Writing articles for magazines and newspapers 30m
      This talk will cover how to produce articles of a semi-technical nature intended for magazines and newspapers, specifically those on the subject of Grid computing.
      Speaker: Dr Ruediger Berlich (FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM KARLSRUHE)
    • 18:30
      Q&A session 30m
      Dr Hammerle and Dr Berlich will take questions on issues raised by their presentations.
      Speaker: Hannelore Hammerle
  • 18:00 20:00
    FIRST Event: eArchiving & Digital Libraries Conf. Room 2

    Conf. Room 2

    CICG

    CICG, 17 rue de Varembé, CH - 1211 Geneva 20 Switzerland

    IT First @ Centre Internationale de Conferences Geneve

    The death of paper: digital libraries & e-
    archiving

    CONTEXT

    As computers are integrated into every aspect of
    modern
    organisations, much of the information that used to be
    stored on paper is being moved to digital storage
    systems.
    These offer many new ways to organise, access and
    analyse
    documents, providing organisations with novel sources
    of
    valuable information. However, if implemented badly,
    e-archiving can be worse than paper, with valuable
    data lost
    forever or winding up in the wrong hands. As a result,
    digital libraries and e-archiving are now a hot topic in
    political, business, scientific and cultural circles.

    Taking advantage of EGEE’06, a major gathering in
    Geneva of
    over 500 experts on Grid technology, Rezonance has
    organised
    a special First on this topic in collaboration with CERN
    openlab and EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE),
    Europe’s
    largest Grid infrastructure project. Grid technology
    provides seamless access to distributed data and
    processing
    capacity on a global scale, and is a promising
    infrastructure for digital libraries to share information –
    either within businesses and international
    organisations or
    within virtual organisations, such as scientific
    communities, or even with the general public, providing
    access to cultural heritage via the Internet.

    OBJECTIVES

    The event features experts from CERN, WHO, leading
    digital
    library and e-archiving research initiatives in Europe,
    and
    solution providers from the IT industry. They will outline
    the state-of-the-art, illustrating their presentations with
    examples from communities and organisations with
    enormous
    amounts of documents that must be digitised. Whether
    you are
    facing e-archiving challenges, developing digital library
    solutions, or simply keen to keep abreast of this
    fast-moving field, this event will provide you with a
    glimpse of the future. And the future is paperless.
    Really!

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