December seminar at Prague illustrated possibilities of EGEE Grid in a complex way

The CESNET association and Masaryk University in Brno held an advanced seminar on the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-SciencE) project on 16th December in Prague. The EGEE project intends to built a pan-European grid infrastructure as a part of the EU's 6th framework programme (see http://eu-egee.org/). This seminar freely follows the induction EGEE seminar in which the attendees got basic knowledge about EGEE and about the application areas for which this environment is designed.

Main motivation for the advanced course was to allow potential users get the personal impression from the work in the EGEE Grid. The whole seminar was devoted to practical exercises in fully production environment of EGEE Grid that the participants could test directly on monitors of their desktops. The seminar attendees tried out to submit computational jobs, monitor their status, get their output and administer data management. All described activities were concretely demonstrated using the command line interface as well as graphical user interfaces using grid portals.

Imaginary "plum on a cake" for the participants was a lecture given by the author of GENIUS portal – generally recognized as standard graphical user interface for the EGEE Grid allowing intuitive work in the grid environment – Dr. Roberto Barbera from INFN (National institute for nuclear physics at University of Catania, Italy). His global lecture sketched in the overall feeling from EGEE Grid. Subsequently the participants left the seminar with complete view about what EGEE Grid enables and how wide is the portfolio of potential applications. The very end of the course was dedicated to the overview of current state of EGEE project with particular focus on the Central Europe (CE) federation activities to allow utilization of all computational resources available in the CE region for those interested already during beginning of 2005.

The presentations from the seminar are available at: http://www.cesnet.cz/doc/seminare/20041216/.

The CESNET association was established by the universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in order to operate a national network for science and research. It is financed from the funds of the Government Council for Science and Research and of its members. At present, it operates the national optical gigabit network CESNET2 and works together with Canada, the Netherlands and the U.S.A. on the building of the global lambda network GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), the Czech part of which is called CzechLight. Thanks to its research activities in the field of telecommunications and Internet technologies, CESNET is the representative of the Czech Republic in the European project GÉANT2, in which it takes an active part.