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Welcome |
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Its summer
at last and the weather, over most of Europe at least, has
been hot! We have lots of news for you in this issue of
the EGEE Newsletter, both within the project and in the
wider world. As always, you can access an online version
of the latest newsletter, as well as all back issues, at
http://egee-intranet.web.cern.ch/egee-intranet/newsletter/Newsletter.html
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4th
EGEE Conference Announced |
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Pisa will host the 4th EGEE conference later on this year.
This high profile event will be held at the Palazzo dei
Congressi di Pisa from 24-28 October 2005. Featuring speakers
from the European Union and Italian Government, as well
as CERN's Director General, the conference looks certain
to live up to the excellent standard of the last conference
in Athens.As
with the last three conferences, this will be an opportunity
both to reflect on the achievements of the last 6 months
and to plan for the future. The website for the conference
is available at http://public.eu-egee.org/conferences/4th/
and registration is now open!
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Departure
of Project Director |
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Project Director Fabrizio Gagliardi announced his departure
from EGEE on 12 June in an email to all members of the
project. Having been highly successful in both EGEE and
its predecessor, European DataGrid, he is now moving on
to take a senior position in Industry. Many project members
will have experienced his dynamic management style and
seemingly limitless energy for promoting EGEE and Grid
technology over the past years, and we all wish him well
in the future.
Fabrizio
will continue to lead the project until 31 October 31,
and so will remain in charge of the planning for the next
phase of EGEE. The project will bid him farewell at the
4th conference in Pisa.
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Two
new applications running on the EGEE infra-structure: Drug
Discovery and Earthquake Analysis |
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Continuing
its mission to support as many scientific disciplines as
possible, EGEE has added two more applications to its portfolio,
Drug Discovery and Earthquake Analysis, both with the potential
to save lives around the world.
The
Drug Discovery application aims to find potential new drugs
to combat malaria, a disease which kills a million people
per year and affects 300 million more. In this application,
scientists carry out “in silico” docking, which
enables researchers to compute the probability that potential
drugs will dock with a target protein - in this particular
case with the active site of one of the malaria parasite
proteins. On a single computer, a study like this, with
100,000 potential drugs, would normally require six months
to complete - but on the EGEE Grid it was achieved in just
two days. The next step is to increase the performance of
the application and compute millions of potential drugs
in only a few weeks, a real possibility with the EGEE
grid. Working at this rate, researchers hope to take a significant
step towards finding a new drug to treat this widespread
and socially devastating disease.
In
comparison, the Earthquake Analysis application takes a
slightly more long term view. Understanding the exact parameters
of when, where and how an earthquake occurs brings researchers
closer to comprehending why earthquakes happen. This may
make it possible to predict earthquakes in the future and
to make the assessment of the potential impact they could
have on a specific region much easier. Rapid analysis is
particularly important for the relief efforts after a major
earthquake, where those in charge need to have accurate
information about the epicenter, magnitude and mechanism
of the earthquake. Using the advanced grid infrastructure
of EGEE, researchers at the Paris Geophysical Institute
(IPGP), France, were able to complete analysis of the large
Indonesian earthquake that occurred on 28 March 2005, just
30 hours after it occurred.
In
both of these cases, EGEE offers a shortcut to calculations
that previously would have taken much longer to complete.
In Drug Discovery this allows researchers to test many more
possible treatments than before, while on Earthquake Analysis
it allows rapid responses to one of the most destructive
kinds of natural disaster.
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gLite
update |
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Since
the first release of gLite at the end of March this year,
both the Middleware Reengineering Activity (JRA1) and the
Operations Activity (SA1) have been very busy deploying
and improving this new lightweight middleware solution.
SA1 has spent much of this time certifying the middleware
and testing it on the new Pre-Production Service, as well
as keeping the main production service running smoothly.
Through several stress tests and a deployment on a wider
scale, the Operations Activity has provided a lot of valuable
feedback to JRA1. The middleware developers, integrators
and testers have responded quickly, releasing several fixes
and critical updates, all of which will also be included
in the soon be released gLite v1.2. This new release will
also include a brand new File Transfer Service for gLite
users, due to be severely stress tested this summer as part
of the 3rd set of LCG Service Challenges.
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Developer
tips for composing web services |
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WSDL can be downloaded from a UDDI registry. If the service
uses JAXRPCServlet you can attach ?WSDL (or ?model) to the
URL request to get the WSDL (or model file).
E.g. http://localhost:8080/Service/Servicename?WSDL |
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Using
a JAX-RPC generated java stub interface you can dynamically
change the service end point for your client by calling
the get_Property(), _setProperty() methods to change the
ENDPOINT_ADDRESS_PROPERTY. This allows you to have alternative
producers in the case of failure.
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Globus
Toolkit 4 released |
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Since the last newsletter, The Globus Alliance has released
the latest version of their extremely widespread Globus
Toolkit (GT). GT4 features a range of new features, such
as a state-of-the-art Web service hosting environments for
Java, Python and C, as well a long list of other improvements.
EGEE
already makes use of a number of GT components in the gLite
middleware stack, and is constantly assessing the Globus
software stack for modules that will make gLite more effective
and more compatible with other global grid efforts. EGEE
already plans to make use of the improved GridFTP functionality
in GT4 (which includes backward compatibility with GT2).
For more information, or to download GT4, see the Globus
Toolkit page at
http://www.globus.org/toolkit/.
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Training
News |
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FORTHCOMING
TRAINING EVENTS
For
full event listings, see
http://www.egee.nesc.ac.uk .
EMBRACE
biomed tutorial, Clermont-Ferrand, France, 25-27 June
This
joint Embrace / EGEE tutorial is mainly dedicated to new
EGEE Biomed application developers as well as Embrace PhD
students and Post doc workers. Programme and registration
can be found at http://tutorial.healthgrid.org
FURTHER
EDUCATION
MSc.
In eScience, University of Edinburgh
This
course will begin at the start of the next academic year.
For further details, see http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/degrees/msc_escience.html.
GRID
SUMMER SCHOOLS
3rd
International Summer School on Grid Computing, Vico Equense,
Italy, 10-22 July
The
School will be held in Vico Equense, Italy (near Naples)
from 10-22 July 2005. It will consist of lectures by experts
in various aspects of grid middleware and grid applications,
and laboratory sessions in which the students will carry
out practical exercises. For details, see http://www.dma.unina.it/~murli/GridSummerSchool2005/.
Regional
EGEE Summer School Budapest, Budapest, Hungary, 11-16 July
The
Regional EGEE Grid Summer School aims at introducing Grid
technology to potential users and at studying and practicing
application developments on the EGEE infrastructure. The
Regional school is open for anyone interested in the use
of EGEE for one's e-Science research. In particular, researchers
and students from the Central European and South European
regions are expected but anyone interested is warmly welcome.
For details, see http://www.egee.hu/grid05/.
GirdKa
Summer School, FZK, Karlsruhe, Germany, 26-30 September
This
event will feature tutorials on gLite Introduction and Installation,
Application Development and ROOT/PROOF.
TRAINING MATERIAL
A
great deal of training material can be found in the NA3
Training Material Archive at: http://www.egee.nesc.ac.uk/trgmat/index.html.
Current
course material is available in:
- EGEE
Induction
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Globus Toolkit
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LCG2 APIs
- LCG2
Installation and Administration
- UML
for developing web services
- Web
Services
We expect
to be adding the first gLite material in the coming months.
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Endnotes |
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A general feedback form on EGEE websites and information
services is now available on the EGEE public website at
http://public.eu-egee.org/feedback/.
If you have the time, please consider filling it in to help
us improve our service.
If you
have comments on the newsletter, or any submissions for
future issues, please contact owen.appleton@cern.ch. Thanks
for reading, end enjoy the summer!
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On
5-6 July, CERN will host an EGEE All
Activity meeting to look at the proposal for EGEE phase
II. For those planning to attend, please send Marie-Laure
an email to ask for an access card. Make sure to arrange accommodation
early as this is likely to be a particularly well attended
meeting. |
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EGEE
in Numbers |
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100
Sites pass daily tests |
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9 June, for the first time, 100 sites on the EGEE production
service passed their daily functional tests. Every day,
SA1 put all sites through a wide and rigorous range of tests
that check almost all aspects of the Grid middleware. In
general, a number of sites will not pass each day, be it
because they cannot be reached, problems with a single component
or scheduled downtime for upgrades. Having 100 sites pass
their daily tests is an important step towards the smoothly
running production service necessary for both EGEE and LCG.
Even better for the project, while some days are inevitably
better than others, since reaching this milestone, the total
number of sites passing their daily tests has frequently
climbed even higher! |
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