Future of the EGG

Being the only technical group within the EIROFORUM, it is clear that the EGG should expand its scope to cover all aspects of e-Science. This should allow the EIROs to foster closer relationships in collaborating on various topics, amongs them:

• Collaboration on licensing of technical software and eventually forcing companies to offer a more coherent policy towayrds all EIROs
• Collaboration on policies dealing with desktop software being used by the academic world (e.g. Skype.) A coordination of the policies and the sharing of the experience would be highly appreciated.
• All EIROs should be encouraged to make software developed in-house available to all other EIROs. For this, the software section on this Wiki should be used.

Reports to DG's should really only contain "achievements" rather than plans! If we can demonstrate that this group is cpable of taking on some major challenges and collaborate on resolving them, simply by coordinating and collaborating, this we should then report to our DG's.

Actions

1. - Wolf-Dieter to write a short report on the Geneva Grid meeting
2. - Marcus to setup a "private" area on the EGG Wiki page

Chair: Salim Ansari / Mark Johnson

Guest via VideoLink^?: John Dyer (TERENA)

Draft Agenda

1. - TERENA Presentation (J. Dyer)
2. - e-IRG introduction (S. Ansari)
3. - The Geneva Grid Conference (W-D Klotz)
4. - Grid Activities from the individual EIROs [All]
5. - Future of the EGG open [All]
6. - AOB

Notes

TERENA Presentation (John Dyer)

John Dyer gave an introductory presentation on the TERENA project and its current status. He encouraged the EIROs to join the Project and become participate in its activities.

e-IRG Introduction (Salim Ansari on behalf of e-IRG)

Salim Ansari gave a presentation on e-IRG and its context within Grid activities. Unfortunately, e-IRG members could not be available to participate, however they have made a wish that both groups exchange ideas on Grid activities.

The Geneva Grid Conference (Wolf-Dieter Klotz)

Wolf-Dieter Klotz was the only participant at last week's Geneva Grid Conference. There were 750 participants with various plenary sessions going on and different specialised working groups concentrated on the EGEE project.

During the plenary sessions had interesting presentations on EGEE, G-Lite middleware. Various domains were also present: e.g. Biology, Earth Science and IT projects. A session was dedicated to Workflows. There the situation is very diverse, as there are many workflow systems that exist today. There was particularly a demonstration of MyGrid^? by ( Prof. ...., Manchester) searching protein structures on databases all over the world. MyGrid^? is based on TAVERNA.

It appears that EGEE is gradually becoming a standard. It is the largest Grid Infrastructure in the World.

The real question is how EGEE will evolve in the future, beyond CERN and High-Energy Physics. One possibility is that it may live a life of its own just like TERENA or DANTE today.

Grid Activities from the individual EIROs [All]

Salim Ansari gave a brief presentation on ESA's activities in Grid. It appears that most efforts have gone "local" and are mainly focused on large-scale number-crunching. At the ESA's Astronomy Centre in Villafranca near Spain, the Grid infrastructure is helping scientists to reprocess XMM-Newton data, while running large simulations for the upcoming Infrared mission Herschel. In ESRIN, several activities revolve around ENVISAT data and how to best process and provide them to the community. Some of the other applications of Grid focus on its use as a collaborative instrument.

NotesMeeting20061005

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