User Forum participants attending a plenary session.
Photo Credit Catalin Cirstoiu, CERN |
When the organizers of the EGEE User Forum started planning for the first event to bring the growing EGEE user community together, they expected at most 140 people to register. Imagine their surprise when more than 240 people registered to attend, and they receive more than 90 abstracts from a range of new and established applications.
"We got an amazing variety of abstracts submitted," said CERN's Massimo Lamanna. "Just glancing through the titles is really interesting, you see applications you'd expect—from biology and high-energy physics, for example—and others like online gaming and archaeology."
Scientists shared their research results and plans through presentations and posters. Protein sequencing, medical imaging, fusion energy research, gamma-ray astronomy, climate modeling, earthquake simulations and quantum chemistry were only a few of the applications discussed. Digital radio broadcasting and financial modeling, as well as research from outside Europe, such as Taiwan's National Digital Archive Project, were also highlighted.
The User Forum, which took place March 1–3, was hosted by CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The event allowed the expanding EGEE user community to meet each other, compare experiences and strengthen communities, and provided an opportunity for EGEE leaders to update users on the status of the project. EGEE is entering its second two-year phase on April 1, and the User Forum was the first of a planned series of user events.
"Many of the attendees were newcomers to EGEE," added Lamanna. "There were many questions from people that had recently joined and needed information on the project to get started. This was also the first time that industry representatives were really mixing with the users. People from IBM, Oracle, HP, Datamat, Apple and several other companies participated."
The forum mixed plenary sessions, describing the EGEE infrastructure and the achievements of several application communities, with two afternoons of parallel sessions.
"The first day we wanted to create a little bit of a community within the different sciences, sharing experiences across countries," said Lamanna. The first set of sessions was organized around four scientific communities: life sciences; earth observations, archaeology and digital libraries; astroparticle physics, astrophysics, fusion and high-energy physics; and computational chemistry, finance and lattice QCD. The second set of sessions was thematic, with presentations grouped by different issues in grid computing: workload and workflow activities; data access on the grid; special types of jobs such as interactive and MPI; and VO management and portals.
For the conference program, video of presentations and book of abstracts visit the EGEE User Forum Web site.
—Katie Yurkewicz
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