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First release of XtremWeb-HEP 8

2012-02-22T13:53:12Z

Oleg Lodygensky from the Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire in Orsay, Paris announced the first release of XtremWeb-HEP 8. This version allows the deployment of virtual machines over desktop grid. The release is available at
http://www.xtremweb-hep.org/spip.php?rubrique15. The documentation is available at http://www.xtremweb-hep.org/spip.php?rubrique16 and a video tutorial at http://www.xtremweb-hep.org/spip.php?article233.

Asia@home at ISGC 2012 to introduce Citizens and Earthquake Science

2012-01-03T08:40:15Z

Asia@home is an event co-organized by Academia Sinica Grid Computing, the Citizen Cyberscience Centre and Desktop Grids for International Scientific Collaboration (DEGISCO).

This year's Asia@home Workshop is on the topic of “Citizens and Earthquake Science”. The focus is on applications of citizen-based volunteer computing and volunteer sensing to earthquake science in South-East Asia. The purpose of the hackfest is to explore new concepts in distributed software and hardware, and brainstorm about how to increase web-based public participation in earthquake science.

The two-day workshop tackles two specific challenges:
The first day focuses on how to deploy the volunteer-based earthquake sensing project Quake Catcher Network in Taiwan and neighbouring regions of South-East Asia, such as Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam. QCN provides seismic researchers with new and unique sources of information about seismic events. It is also contributing to public awareness about earthquake science.

The second day focuses on integrating large-scale simulation packages for earthquake science with the volunteer computing platform BOINC, so that home PCs and laptops, as well as desktop grids in research institutes, may contribute to simulation-based research. Topics include volunteer cloud computing, bridging volunteer and grid resources, and services provided by the International Desktop Grdi Federation (IDGF).

Guest speakers include Prof. Jesse Lawrence, Stanford School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University.

Asia@home welcomes seismic scientists, grid and volunteer computing enthusiasts, and science education experts.

More information is available at http://event.twgrid.org/isgc2012/asiaathome.html

ISGC 2012 registration opens now

2012-01-03T08:38:51Z

The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2012 will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei, from 26 February to 2 March 2012, with co-located events and workshops. The conference is hosted by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC), Taipei, Taiwan. To enjoy the early bird discount rate, you can register before 13 January, 2012.

"Convergence, Collaboration, Innovation" is the theme of ISGC 2012. The last decade has seen the wide-scale emergence of e-Infrastructure as a critical asset for the modern e-Scientist. The emergence of large-scale research infrastructures and instruments that has produced a torrent of electronic data is forcing a generational change in the scientific process and the mechanisms used to analyse the resulting data deluge.

No longer can the processing of these vast amounts of data and production of relevant scientific results be undertaken by a single scientist. Virtual Research Communities that span organisations around the world, through an integrated digital infrastructure that connects the trust and administrative domains of multiple resource providers, have become critical in supporting these analyses.

ISGC 2012 will be the 10th meeting, that over the last decade has tracked the convergence, collaboration and innovation of individual researchers across the Asia Pacific region to a coherent community and as a result has helped drive the growth of regional e-Science activities and its collaborations around the world.

For more symposium information and detailed topic description, you can visit the conference website at http://event.twgrid.org/isgc2012/index.html

Topics of Interest include:

Applications and results from the Virtual Research Communities and Industry:
1. High Energy Physics
2. Biomedicine and Life Sciences
3. Earth Science, Environmental Changes and Natural Disaster Mitigation
4. Humanities and Social Sciences

Activity to enable the provisioning of a Resource Infrastructure:
5. Operation and Management
6. Middleware and Interoperability
7. Security and Networking
8. Infrastructure clouds and Virtualisation
9. Business Models and Sustainability

Technologies that provide access and exploitation of different site resources and infrastructures:
10. Data Management
11. Distributed Volunteer and Desktop Grid Computing
12. High Throughput Computing
13. High Performance, Manycore and GPU Computing

IDGF marketing at SC11 in Seattle

2011-11-18T12:52:33Z

The International Desktop Grid Federation is getting quite some exposure at SC11 in Seattle, Washington, November 12-18, 2011 at booth #2639 of the Hungarian Grid Competence Centre. You can find the IDGF poster there. For more explanation, IDGF-representative Robert Lovas is present at SC11 for MTA SZTAKI. MTA SZTAKI provides high level grid gateways, application porting support and turn-key solutions for grid users. As the project coordinator of several EU projects, its research and support activities focus on Desktop Grids, Clouds, and work flow interoperability.

DEGISCO member IMP wins First Prize Poster award at Cracow Grid workshop

2011-11-10T07:47:17Z

The Ukraine IDGF member IMP, lead by Yuri Gordienko from the DEGISCO project did win the first price for best poster at the Cracow Grid Workshop.

The full title is: "From Quantity to Quality: Massive Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Nanostructures under Plastic Deformation in Desktop and Service Grid Distributed Computing Infrastructure: O. Baskova, O. Gatsenko, L. Bekenev, E. Pavlov, and Y. Gordienko."

Congratulations to the Ukraine team!

SLinCA@Home Logo Contest, deadline for submissions: 30 November, 2011

2011-11-02T08:22:30Z

In cooperation with Krajina Mriy Publishing House (Kiev, Ukraine) the team at G.V. Kurdyumov Institute for Metal Physics (IMP) of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine is glad to announce about their "SLinCA@Home Logo Contest" (please, see guidelines for the contest at the project forum), which is open for participation of any interested person, including children, pupils of secondary schools, housewives, students, etc. Deadline for submissions: 30 November, 2011.

University of Westminster to hire reseach assistant in distributed, Grid and Cloud computing

2011-10-25T13:50:06Z

A 2 year position for a researcher in distributed, Grid and Cloud computing is available at the University of Wetminster London at the Centre for Parallel Computing (CPC) in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The researcher will undertake research and development within the framework of EU and UK Research Council funded projects in distributed computing infrastructure (DCI). The post arises specifically to deliver several EU FP7-funded projects. The postholder will play a key supporting role in: porting and supporting the development of scientific applications and work flows to Cloud-based DCI's; supporting research scientist end-users; and supporting, developing and enhancing the Cloud-, Grid-, multicore- and GPU-based infrastructure of the CPC. This researcher assistant position has a duration of 2 years with a fixed term contract. Closing date for application is Friday 4 November 2011. The interview date is set on Friday 25 November 2011. More information is available at http://www.wmin.ac.uk/hrvacancies/default.aspx

Jubilee 10th IDGF workshop at Universiti Putra Malaysia

2011-10-18T13:47:53Z

A successful Desktop Grid workshop was conducted on 27 until 30 September 2011 in Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) in the framework of an initiative from UPM and IDGF to promote Desktop Grid technology among Malaysian researchers and also service grid operators. The workshop started with an open seminar delivered by Dr. Robert Lovas from MTA-SZTAKI, remote presentation from Prof. Stephen C. Winter from University of Westminster, UK and Dr. Rohaya Latip from Universiti Putra Malaysia. The open seminar was attended by 52 participants and followed by a 3-day workshop with hands-ons that was attended by 23 participants. The outcome from the workshop are two desktop grid deployment plans from UPM and University of Technology Petronas (UTP) and one identified application to be ported and running on the desktop grid infrastructure from University of Technical Malaysia Melaka (UTeM).

Source: Dr. Rohaya Latip (UPM)
More info: http://idec.upm.edu.my/DesktopGrid

OurGrid version 4.2.6 now released

2011-09-28T10:11:37Z

The OurGrid version 4.2.6 has just been released. This version comes with several bug fixes. The major ones are the ones, that resolved deadlock issues in the Commune components, and the ones related to Worker reallocation when other components fail. The team has also released Commune 1.0, which is a much lighter and faster version of Commune. This version uses JSON in the message structure, which resulted in smaller messages and faster serialization times. You can download the OurGrid components at http://www.ourgrid.org/index.php/pt/download

Tenth IDGF Workshop and Tutorial coming up

2011-09-09T12:19:06Z

The 10th IDGF Workshop on Desktop Grid Computing will be held 27-30 September 2011 at the Universiti Putra in Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia. The programme has been finalized and is available at http://desktopgridfederation.org/10th-idgf-tutorial-and-workshop

Registration now open for 8th IDGF Workshop

2011-07-22T09:31:07Z

The 8th IDGF Workshop will be held August 17, 2011, 14h-18h in Hannover, Germany. This workshop is organized by the International Desktop Grid Federation and by SZTAKI for the European chapter. It is co-located with the 7th BOINC Workshop that will take place on August 18-19. This workshop is focused around the Desktop Grids for eScience Roadmap - a new version has just been published - and a panel session on issues and opportunities in Desktop Grids. The workshop will provide a platform for scientific users, Desktop Grid operators, system administrators and application developers to exchange experiences about Desktop Grids and related technology. More information and a registration form are available at http://desktopgridfederation.org/8th-idgf-workshop.

Version 4.2.4 of OurGrid middleware released

2011-07-18T07:53:22Z

Francisco Brasileiro from the Universidade Federal de Campina Grande announced that Version 4.2.4 of the OurGrid middleware has been released. This version of OurGrid has fixed some of the known bugs, including the need for re-ordering XMPP messages due to a known bug on the Openfire Jabber Server, the output of the NoF balances on the peer status command, the refactoring of the Aggregator component, and a new script and image for the installation of vserver-based workers. The community status can be viewed at http://status.ourgrid.org. The components of OurgGrid version 4.2.4 can be downloaded at http://www.ourgrid.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44&Itemid=37&lang=pt. You are invited to use the Mailing Lists to provide any suggestion, feedback or question concerning OurGrid use and development.

New edition of Desktop Grids for eScience Road Map now available

2011-07-13T10:13:41Z

DEGISCO has released a new edition of the Desktop Grids for eScience Road Map on July 11, 2011. The document is comprised of two parts. The first part constitutes a bird view of all the relevant topics to be considered when setting up a Desktop Grid infrastructure. This management part is addressed to political stakeholders and the general public. The second part offers a detailed and step-by-step description in five chapters of all the challenges and issues to be solved including relevant links to background information and practical examples. This technical part is aimed at Desktop Grid operators, scientific users, the academic user community, legal experts, and volunteer computing organisations. The Road map documents are available in the IDGF download section.

Register for the DCI Summerschool

2011-06-03T11:33:42Z

Do not forget to register for the Distributed Computer Infrastructure Summerschool in July in Budapest. It featurs a complete EDGI technology day. But you learn also about DEGISCO Desktop Grids, EMI middleware and StratusLab Clouds.

IDGF demonstrations at the award-winner booth of MTA SZTAKI at FET

2011-05-10T08:35:51Z

This year 'The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition' (FET11, http://fet11.eu) attracted more than 1000 participants between 4-6 May 2011 in Budapest, Hungary. MTA SZTAKI (http://sztaki.hu) presented its latest joint achievements with its collaborating partners including (among others) the e-Infrastructure related efforts for science; such as the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF, http://desktopgridfederation.org), the interoperation of volunteer projects with the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI, http://egi.eu), and the digital watermarking Facebook application of WEB2GRID project (http://web2grid.econet.hu).

Robert's robot looking at what to do with his idle processor time from Desktop Grid Federation on Vimeo.

The three teams together from MTA SZTAKI (Booth #16) were awarded by the European Commission based on the votes of visitors (sponsored by ERCIM). The exhibitor team has received the Exhibit Third Price for the booth 'Future technologies to support collaborative solutions for grand challenges (Biological water safety, Augmented collaboration, e-Infrastructures for science)' by Szabolcs Tokes, Peter Galambos, Robert Lovas et al. (www.fet11.eu/awards). The exhibition had a great outcome: Three new organisations decided to join IDGF, several new volunteers joined the SZTAKI Desktop Grid project, and several new applications have been identified to be ported on the EDGI (edgi-project.eu) and DEGISCO (http://degisco.eu) infrastructures in the near future.

Register now for the Joint European DCI Summer School

2011-04-14T09:53:13Z

EDGI will organize a joint DCI Summer School with EMI, IGE, EGI-Inspire, StratusLab and DEGISCO in Budapest between 11-16 July 2011. The subject of the summer school is to give insights to the technologies provided by the EMI, IGE, EDGI and StratusLab projects. Based on the EGI-InSPIRE and DEGISCO project experiences the school will also address the issues of how to organize production infrastructures based on these technologies, how to port applications for such infrastructures and how to support users of these infrastructures. More information is available at http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/eudciss2011/

EDGI submits 10,000 jobs to Desktop Grid at EGI User Forum

2011-04-13T16:40:39Z

At the EGI User Forum, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, the EDGI project for the first time demonstrated a brand new feature. The feature is called the MetaJob mechanism by which users are enabled to submit jobs to the EDGI Desktop Grid through gLite using command-line tools in the range of thousands jobs, tens of thousands jobs or even more. This was being demonstrated in the EDGI booth with great success. During the day 10,000 jobs were submitted several times to show the EGI User Forum visitors, how the jobs can easily be processed by BOINC and to show the gLite users, how MetaJob can be used through glite, without disrupting the gLite infrastructure.

Desktop Grids at Russian HPC conference

2011-04-12T16:28:22Z

The DEGISCO ISA RAS team - founding member of IDGF - participated in a PAVT'2011 which is commonly recognized as a largest HPC event in Russia. The main objective of the conference - provide an opportunity to discuss the future development of parallel computing technology and the results obtained by leading research groups in HPC. Conference topics cover all aspects of high performance computing in science and technology, including applications, hardware and software, specialized languages and packages. The talk Increasing computing power of distributed systems by grids of PCs given by ISA RAS received much attention and resulted in an interesting and fruitful discussion. The usual ISA RAS tutorial on desktop grids collected five attendees which gave high marks to the tutors and appreciated the training. http://agora.guru.ru/display.php?conf=pavt2011

Desktop Grids at EGI UF in Vilnius final programme available

2011-04-08T09:11:08Z

For the attendees of the EGI UF in Vilnius, Lithuania we created a virtual document bag. But even if you are not going to Vilnius it contains useful up-to-date information on Desktop Grids. There is a handy flyer summarizing what is happening in Vilnius. And the final workshop programme is also available.

University of Westminster has launched the UK’s first BOINC-based Desktop Grid system

2011-04-01T13:39:50Z

On March 29, 2011 the University of Westminster has issued a press release announcing its new DIY supercomputer which is saving thousands of pounds. The system uses spare PC capacity to generate calculations. This development can help universities, pharma and health care companies save money and speed up crucial research. The Centre for Parallel Computing is a partner in DEGISCO. The press release is available at the website of the University of Westminster.