12, North American LHC Tier2 Networking Meeting, Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois

12-14, Second ESnet Collaboration Workshop, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California

17-19, BIRN All Hands Meeting 2005, La Jolla, California

18-21, EDUCAUSE 2005 Annual Conference, Orlando, Florida

19-21, e-2005 eChallenges Conference, Ljubljana, Slovenia

19-22, Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference 2005, Albuquerque, New Mexico

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The processing power of grids is being applied to cancer treatment through the GEANT4 Application for Tomographic Emission (GATE) program. Medical physicists simulate the passage of ionizing radiation through the body when planning radiation therapy treatment for cancer, and GATE provides a more accurate method than many programs currently in use. The long execution time has prevented GATE from being adopted in clinics, but use of grid resources allows the program to be sped up by a factor of 30. This image shows a GATE simulation for brachytherapy, in which a 106Ru/106Rh opthalmic applicator is used to treat ocular melanoma and benign tumors.

Grids harness the power of geographically dispersed computing resources, experimental facilities and research centers. There are now many independently operated grids across the globe, and users able to work on one can't necessarily gain access to another. Making sure that owners of different grids trust each other's security procedures is essential to letting researchers access all available resources.

"Recently, the number of organizations involved in large-scale regional and international grid projects in the Asia-Pacific region has been dramatically increasing," said Yoshio Tanaka, chair of the Asia Pacific Grid Policy Management Authority. "There is a strong demand for establishing trust federation with production grid projects in Europe and Americas. The IGTF accelerates the emergence of a globe-wide grid infrastructure."

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Scientific communities worldwide are not up to the task of huge cultural change, say two British researchers. Cautionary tales surrounding obstacles to trust, security, standards, training and collaboration jolted delegates out of their afternoon torpor in the closing sessions of the APAC05 (Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing) conference on the Gold Coast.

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Korea Joins International Computing Infrastructure
Supercomputing Online, October 11, 2005

The Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development (GLORIAD) reached a milestone in its vision to create a network of high-speed computing capability around the northern hemisphere when it celebrated connectivity with Korea in a ceremony last month.

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Planet-Scale grid
Computerworld, October 10, 2005
by Patrick Thibodeau

In 2007, scientists will begin smashing protons and ions together in a massive, multinational experiment to understand what the universe looked like tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang.

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"There are thousands of resources in the grid," said Andreozzi. "If you express certain requirements for resources, there may still be 100 that match your criteria. We are developing a methodology and a language that will allow a user to express a continuous spectrum of preferences. With boolean matches, a resource matches a requirement or it doesn't; no one resource will match better than others. There are rank-based approaches, but they can be difficult to use when you want to collect many different attributes with different levels of importance. We need a high-level language that is close to our perception of preference that can be automatically processed by a machine."

Andreozzi has worked with grids since 2002, first in the Data Transatlantic Grid (DataTAG) project and now in EGEE. An employee at INFN-CNAF in Bologna, he is part of the core group that designs and develops the GridICE monitoring tool.

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The first workshop, Grid Application Planning and Implementation, will take place December 6–8 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, located at the University of Texas at Austin. Early registration is available through November 22 for a fee of $125. This workshop is the second in a series covering grid infrastructure development and deployment for advanced scientific applications. A technical workshop, "Grid Technology: The Rough Guide," will be offered immediately following the main workshop for an additional registration fee of $75.

The second workshop, Life Sciences Applications on the Grid, will take place January 9–11 at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. Early registration is available through December 22 for a fee of $175. This workshop targets the unique needs of life science researchers involved in data and computationally intensive areas of study, including genetics, neuroscience, biomedical imaging, drug discovery, translational research, molecular chemistry, zoology and botany.