Saturday, May 12, 2007
So long, Manchester...
 We just left Manchester yesterday morning. The travel was OK and now I'm sitting in front of my computer at Madrid, rewinding all this week's feelings. The “Manchester Multicultural Workshop” was a success! Countries represented were Spain, Italy and Poland. We started at the “Grand Central” Pub where we could enjoy some live music  (Britt-heavy metal, actually). Then we moved to the “Fab Cafe”... yes, the one that was visited the night before and I couldn't remember the name written on the door (too long). I strongly recommend to visit its website. This bar is what a Sci-Fi maniac deserves! There you'll find Star Trek's ships models, gadgets from the Dr. Who series, even an “Outrun” arcade! It's so... “retromodern”.  When the “Fab Cafe” closed, we moved to “Charlie's”, which is a nearby disco. There we could enjoy some great House music sessions. We were lucky with the live music in general that night and, we were very lucky to have the opportunity to meet all our “Grid-friends” and make new ones. As it always happens in this kind of events, new collaboration proposals were made that night (“Ideas Exchange is not being made only in the Exchange Rooms”). Let's see how they evolve in the future!
Now it's time for me to thank all the people from the event for being themselves: FANTASTIC. I would like to thank specially Massimo Lamanna for the organization and support, and Rosy Mondardini for considering me for the GridCast initiative this week (Grazie di cuore!). Of course, my thanks go also to you, my readers. I hope you have enjoyed reading my GridCast entries as that was my commitment. Well, that's all, I really hope to meet you all as soon as possible. Manchester was great... really great! 
P.D. I'll post all the photos I took this week in the Gallery Section of my website. This is going to happen in two weeks or so, as I'm going to Rio de Janeiro for the CCGrid'07 Conference, so please be patient. If you want to read all my GridCasts for this event, click here. Labels: jlvazquez-poletti
Thursday, May 10, 2007
GIIS: Rafael Mayo
 QUESTION 1. "WHAT" ARE YOU IN THE GRID? EELA Applications Manager. QUESTION 2. WHAT IS THE GRID FOR YOU? A good opportunity to share not only resources, but knowledge. QUESTION 3. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE THE GRID TO BE FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD? A common way of work. Labels: GIIS, jlvazquez-poletti
GIIS: Harald Kornmayer
 QUESTION 1. "WHAT" ARE YOU IN THE GRID? I'm acting on both sides: As a scientist the Grid is the perfect tool to solve my scientific problem as the Grid enables collaboration. As a tool developer (project lead of the g-Eclipse project, www.geclipse.eu) I want to lower the threshold for user to enter the Grid. QUESTION 2. WHAT IS THE GRID FOR YOU? The vision of the seamless access to resources of a scientific collaboration was the dream for me as a young scientist. The Grid is the tool I wanted to have when I started with science. As still some big obstacles are on the road to reach this vision, the Grid is very complex. QUESTION 3. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE THE GRID TO BE FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD? The Grid will be the infrastructure to enable science in the future. That would be enough to have a big impact in society, even without involvement of industry. Such an infrastructure will be the base for a further development of human knowledge. Labels: GIIS, jlvazquez-poletti
Sessions, visits and Rock n' Roll
 Yesterday night we had great time both at the Globus Party and the “First Manchester Italian-Spanish Summit”. This last event took place at Indian Restaurant called “Ashoka” at Portland Street. Dishes are great, exotic and they will surely satisfy you. The plan was to go to pubs/clubs later. The recommendation this time is the club near the restaurant (“This ain't a TV...”-something). It closed nearly at 3.00 am and people there were very friendly.   And today... the codename for me was: “Workflow Session”. I performed a talk about the Fusion Physics application we ported using GridWay (MARATRA: MAssive RAy TRAcing is not a prototype anymore, now it's at production state). I was very satisfied with the feedback given by the public.  Also my colleague Antonio Juan had a talk in that session. In his case, it was about using GridWay for virtualization. He explained how a real life problem (European Space Agency satellite image processing) was solved using this solution and gave experimental results of overheads given by different approaches inside virtualization. Gongratuations, Antonio juan.
The lunch program was to visit the Manchester processor farm. It was a nice visit and we lunched there nearby the machines. Technology, good food and nice chat. What else can be needed? 
Even if the day has not finished yet... here we launch a CFP (Call For Participation) for a MMW (Manchester Multicultural Workshop). We'll meet at Palace Manchester Hotel (Oxford Street, remember) at 22.00 zulu. As we'll leave tomorrow morning... Hope to see you there!
Labels: jlvazquez-poletti
Meeting People....
Having arrived late (yesterday afternoon) at the ODF and EGEE User Forum I still haven't been to many presentation, instead I have a had very productive time meeting people outside the sessions.  These have included discussions about the possible future work and funding of the Real Time Monitor (RTM) that we have written at Imperial College London. This is one of the most widely used dissemination tools and has, in various forms, been used to explain the operation of the Grid to thousands of people at different conferences around the world, including such dignitaries as the King of Spain and the President of India. The RTM can be downloaded from http://gridportal.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/rtm/. However, despite being so widely used this has fallen between the funding initiative of the UK funding council (the GridPP reviewers thought that it should be funded through PPARC dissemination and PPARC dissemination reviewers thought that it should be funded as part of GridPP) Bastards... So now we are looking at the possibility of funding through EGEE III. Through the RTM we have collected job trajectories of some twenty millions jobs and another discsussion has been about these data can be incorporated into the Grid Obversatory. The Grid Observatory is an attempt to perform good computer science on the EGEE. Other discussions have been around a variety of projects in which we are involved or would like to be involved. To me, the real purpose of these meetings is as much to gather people together to meet each other outside the sessions as it is to view the presentations.
Data Management in the grid
This morning I attended the data management session. It seems that most communities have the same problems- how do I get my data consistently on the grid without bothering about all the details of EGEE, how do I discover my data, once it is on the grid and how do I control access. Concerning the metadata, AMGA seems to be a prominent solution. The presentation I enjoyed most, was the last one of the morning session, the one about gdse. They are making existing databases accessible in EGEE by integrating them as so called "Query elements", basically another type of CE. I really liked the idea of this deep integration of databases into EGEE.
GIIS: Miguel Cárdenas
QUESTION 1. "WHAT" ARE YOU IN THE GRID? When I think which my present role in my organization is, I arrive to the conclusion that I am a cover-hole man for all issues: from to write (with a lot of colleagues) a FP7 project, to prospect new applications or new candidates to the positions of the center, passing by to organize public event or to install new computer for a project. I am a practice man, I like the theoretical work and the practical issued to feel myself alive. Besides I try to cover the skill don't fulfilled by my colleagues to achieve a coherent group. QUESTION 2. WHAT IS THE GRID FOR YOU? Firstly it is way and the reason for communicate with a lot of people around the world. And that communication produces a wonderful and powerful infrastructure that should be easy the way to produce advances in the science and the technology. One of the most interesting features of the grid is that bring together the called big sciences with other disciplines that traditionally didn't have an access to big computational resources. QUESTION 3. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE THE GRID TO BE FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD? A vehicle. A vehicle to improve the way to produce science and technology in all country around the world. Them these improvements arrive to the peoples living anywhere. Also a vehicle to communicate with other persons, to learn from them and from their culture, improving the relationships between the countries. Labels: GIIS, jlvazquez-poletti
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We just left Manchester yesterday morning. The travel was OK and now I'm sitting in front of my computer at Madrid, rewinding all this week's feelings. 
(Britt-heavy metal, actually). 
When the “Fab Cafe” closed, we moved to “Charlie's”, which is a nearby disco. There we could enjoy some great House music sessions. We were lucky with the live music in general that night and, we were very lucky to have the opportunity to meet all our “Grid-friends” and make new ones. As it always happens in this kind of events, new collaboration proposals were made that night (“Ideas Exchange is not being made only in the Exchange Rooms”). Let's see how they evolve in the future!
