Description
Astronomy & Astrophysics community is in EGEE since 2004 with two pilot applications now in EGEE-III. Ever since the presence of the AA community in EGEE is continuously growing and now five funded and eight unfunded research groups contribute to the AA cluster with applications and use-cases. AA applications are particularly interesting given that they are extremely challenging in terms of resource demands, both conventional and non conventional. Three main AA VOs are in place in EGEE; two of them are dedicated to the pilot applications; the last one is a generic VO where new AA user communities can find adequate resources to start their activities. The interest of the AA community for EGEE and its Grid infrastructure is further increasing and new research groups asked recently to join the AA VOs to exploit EGEE Grid facilities through them.
The 4th User Forum is an excellent opportunity to get an overview of the progress in adopting EGEE and its Grid infrastructure within the AA community. Ten AA abstracts have been submitted for the User Forum and this certainly represents a success. Eight of them have been proposed as oral contributions, one is a poster and finally one has been proposed as a demo. Contributions equally address scientific and technological aspects related to the usage of the Grid technology as well as the adoption of tools and services to make easier or more efficient the porting of applications. Besides the contributions aimed at demonstrate progresses in migrating applications to Grid, the key topic to discuss in the framework of the 4th User Forum AA session will be the discussion about the necessary actions to be undertaken for the transition of the AA community to EGI.
