Eike Jessen of the EGEE External Advisory Board visiting the UNOSAT stand
during the judging of the "Best Demo" competition.
Image Courtesy Owen Appleton, EGEE
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Last week's conference of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE project brought more than 700 participants from five continents to Geneva, Switzerland. The first EGEE conference to broaden its scope beyond technical meetings of the project's activities, EGEE'06 included sessions geared toward business and industry, those featuring applications running on EGEE, a one-day forum for EGEE users, a series of workshops for EGEE-related projects and federations, and a demonstration and poster session.
"The most interesting part for me was meeting people from all the other projects, and learning about the different ways of applying their work with the grid," said Paola Celio from Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, who attended the conference as a representative from the EUChinaGrid project. Another EUChinaGrid representative, Xavier Jeannin from France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, noted that the conference offered an opportunity for the members of their newly formed project to meet each other and draw up a work plan.
Scientific research was well-represented at the conference, with examples of applications running on the EGEE infrastructure ranging from biomedicine and earth sciences to chemistry and fusion. The well-attended business track included an introduction to EGEE and opportunities for businesses, an overview of grid business models and challenges, and examples of grid use by different sectors. The Mini User Forum gave EGEE users from all areas a place to meet and exchange information about the technical details of running on the EGEE infrastructure.
Members of the EGEE Project Management Board pose with members of the
EUMedGrid and EUChinaGrid projects.
Image Courtesy Owen Appleton, EGEE
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National and regional grids and federations from across Europe and beyond also met at EGEE'06. The brand-new SwissGrid initative kicked off at the conference. Projects bridging several regions, such as EUChinaGrid between Europe and China, and EUMedGrid between Europe and the Mediterranean region, planned their next steps. Technical meetings of grid technology projects such as KnowArc, and of many of the EGEE activities, were also held in Geneva.
In the keynote speeches, attendees heard from political and grid dignitaries from Europe and the United States. In the opening sessions, Bob Jones, the project director for the second phase of EGEE, briefly introduced the project and its goals over the next two years. The head of the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure, Daniel Atkins, spoke about capitalizing on cyberinfrastructure in service of discovery and learning, focusing on current and future international cooperation.
Later in the week, keynote speeches focused on the characteristics and diversity of grid applications, building better portals so that more scientists can use the variety of available applications, and what scientists want from portals, applications, and e-science and the grid itself.
"The EGEE'06 conference was very successful in bringing together a broad mix of communities and projects to discuss about the Grid," said EGEE project director Jones. "To reduce overlap and multiplication of meetings, the infrastructure projects agreed that they will participate at future EGEE conferences and events. Together with the strong business interest seen at the conference, this made EGEE'06 the European grid event of the year." EGEE hopes to keep the momentum going with its next User Forum, to be held in conjunction with Open Grid Forum 20 in Manchester, UK in May, and then with the next EGEE conference in Budapest, Hungary in the autumn of 2007.
Learn more at the EGEE Web site.
—Katie Yurkewicz, SGTW Editor
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