Vico Equense's coastline. Image Courtesy Alison McCall

The Third International Summer School on Grid Computing's 64 participants from 17 countries on five continents—young researchers from technical industries, research laboratories, and academic environments—received an in-depth introduction to grid technologies and applications. More than seventy hours of lectures, practical exercises, directed reading and reports from leading researchers covered the main topics in grid development and technology, worldwide grid efforts and emerging key grid applications. The curriculum of the school, which took place over two weeks in July, was designed and delivered by an international committee of experts.

"Once again the international summer school demonstrated the power of openness, sharing and collaboration which are the pillars of grid computing," commented Miron Livny, chair of this year's Programme Committee. "Students and instructors with a broad spectrum of interests and expertise came together to get exposed to new ideas, share requirements and collaborate on addressing the challenges we face in translating the concepts of distributed computing into dependable tools."

Participants and instructors at the Third International Summer School on Grid Computing. Image Courtesy Alison McCall

Hands-on laboratory exercises gave students practical experience with widely used grid middleware. The exercises used a locally-established testbed, connected to major international grid resources, that offered middleware commonly used by projects in the Asia-Pacific, the European Union and the United States.

Students learned the fundamental components of grid environments such as authentication, authorization, resource access and resource discovery, and how to use them for job submission. They were also exposed to e-infrastructures, a new approach to distributed computing which will support collaboration and resource sharing while amortising costs over a wide range of uses. Planning has already started for next year's summer school.

"The excellent students, the worldwide recognition and the enthusiastic atmosphere of these summer schools means that there is already a band of international experts lining up to teach at the school next year," said Malcolm Atkinson, chair of the ISSGC06 Programme Committee.

The school was endorsed by the Global Grid Forum and sponsored by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR-Napoli), Institute for Composite and Biomedical Materials (IMCB), and SPACI consortium, FIRB Grid.it Project, EGEE Project and Condor Project.

Learn more at the ISSGC05 Web site.