EMI and IGE both supply distributed computing technologies in Europe in order to provide European researchers with a pan-European computing infrastructure built from federated distributed resources and access to desktop grids. These projects support, maintain and develop middleware, and explore the application of cloud computing to grid infrastructures and scientific research. In particular, Globus, a grid middleware example, is a set of tools for constructing a grid, covering security measures, resource location and management, communications and so on. Many major grid projects use Globus, which is being developed by the Globus Alliance, a group involving Ian Foster's team at Argonne National Laboratory and Carl Kesselman's team at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In Europe, IGE is driving forward Globus developments according to European user requirements in close collaboration with the European Grid Initiative (EGI), Distributed Computing Infrastructure (DCI) projects, and Standard Development Organizations (SDOs).  

The specific goals of the new EMI/IGE Collaboration defined by the MoU are to:

1) ensure the provision of dedicated support from Globus developers and maintainers,
2) ensure EMI internal plans are known to IGE for IGE's planning purposes,
3) deliver interoperable EMI and IGE solutions,
4) provide Globus and EMI platform requirements respectively through IGE and EMI releases.

Thanks to this MoU, user will be able to use a common infrastructure, benefitting from the computing edge technologies provided by both these Initiatives. So, just as the very old but true saying: "together we stand, divided we fall"…    

13 February 2012

Contacts

October 3, 2011

EMI [1] teamed-up with a number of projects in a large-scale trans-continental scientific computing challenge. LINGA (LInked Neuroscientific Grand chAllenge) is the first data and compute challenge involving neuro-scientific infrastructures from two continents – neuGRID [2] (Europe), CBRAIN [3] (North America) and LONI [4] (North America), and distributed computing infrastructures – EGI’s Life Science Computing Grid  [5] (LSCG, Europe) and EMI resources [6] (Europe). Some 11,000 brain scans from distributed neuro-centers were analyzed using computationally demanding image processing applications for marker discovery in neuro-degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

The challenge is not only due to the scale and distributed nature of the data sets or the complexity of the image processing applications in use; the participating infrastructures use different underlying compute management technologies. SHIWA [7] and outGRID [8] projects developed a framework that orchestrates these heterogeneous infrastructures such that their underlying compute solutions are harnessed to process brain scans coming from different sources and handle different ‘stages’ of the image processing applications. Processing is done in parallel and asynchronously, with the aggregated output further processed by LSGC. Two important components are extracted to explain the outputs’ variability and potential correlations between individuals’ characteristics and the disease development. If this activity was run in a single neuro-scientific centre, it would have taken 50 days. Through this collaboration, the challenge concluded in seven days using 3,000 CPUs per processing cycle. The LINGA challenge was presented at the EGI Technical Forum 2011 [10] where it won the Best Demonstration competition. 

For this scientific challenge, EMI has made available its demonstration testbed with the latest services from EMI 1 Kebnekaise. Specifically the EMI services EMI-BDII (top and site), EMI-CREAM, EMI-WMS and EMI-WN provided one set of the compute technologies leveraged by the SHIWA-outGRID framework. This collaboration has been an excellent opportunity for EMI to showcase its first release, EMI 1 Kebnekaise, and is a good demonstration of the stability and usability of EMI 1 services for large-scale scientific research.

For more information, please contact:

14 April 2011, Vilnius, Lithuania

First EMI Technical Conference Draws more than 300 Participants

The First EMI Technical Conference was held in Vilnius, Lithuania from April 10 to 14, 2011. EMI hosted the event together with the EGI User Forum and more that 300 participants attended. The conference gathered middleware, Grid and Cloud customers from all over Europe and overseas, most of them involved in the major European Infrastructure projects and affiliated with the most important Research and Academic Institutions in the field.

The need to learn more about the continuously increasing possibilities offered by the Grid infrastructure to do research and produce knowledge was very evident during the 4 days conference. There is a great need to do more and better for society in general and the help that new technologies can give to research is proven by the fact that the number of customers who find the infrastructure a helpful tool for their work is growing constantly.

EMI dedicated some sessions to tutorials, which were attended by many interested persons who got the chance to learn more about the improved usability of the middleware and the technical features that the first release, due to be made public in few weeks, will have.

A "meet the experts" session was also organized. A crowded room of people asked questions about the middleware, the critical issues, the specific features. This was an occasion to better understand how the 4 main European middleware providers are interacting to make the passage to a "single" middleware the smoothest possible.

Furthermore, an exhibition booth was set up, where all major activities currently carried on by the project were presented. Visitors dropped by to get insights about topics discussed during the sessions and to fill in a questionnaire about the EMI middleware and the particular needs for their specific field of interest and work. All the information from the survey was handed over to the EMI technical people for evaluation and consideration in the future work activities.
The EMI booth was visited by many high profile personalities in the Grid community. EMI dissemination team caught the occasion to interview some of them and understand what is their vision on the digital technology transition that is occurring and the role that, in their opinion, EMI could have in this transition. Among the interviewed we got the chance to hear from Mrs. Ruth Pordes from FNAL and OSG executive director, Mrs. Isabel Campos, coordinator of the Spanish Grid Infrastructure, Mrs. Valeria Ardizzone, technical coordinator of the Decide Project, Mr. Alexandre Bonvin, WeNMR Project Manager, Mr. Vangelis Floros, from the StratuLab Project, Mr. Ladislav  Hluchy, from the Slovakian Grid Infrastructure and representing customers from the Earth Science field, Mr. Steven Newhouse, EGI project General Director, Mr. Kostas Glinos, EU–DG Head of Unit Officer.

From their words it was clear that a lot of customers have high expectations from the EMI project and all of them do believe that EMI will meet the demands coming from the various communities. EMI is committed reaching its goals on schedule and fulfilling the expectations of the user communities.

Contact

Pina Salente, EMI NA2. For a contact email please visit the contacts page.

Photo (c)2011 Andrea Caltroni.