122,894 research outputs found

    WISDOM: A Grid-Enabled Drug Discovery Initiative Against Malaria

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    The goal of this chapter is to present the WISDOM initiative, which is one of the main accomplishments in the use of grids for biomedical sciences achieved on grid infrastructures in Europe. Researchers in life sciences are among the most active scientifi c communities on the EGEE infrastructure. As a consequence, the biomedical virtual organization stands fourth in terms of resources consumed in 2007, with an average of 7000 jobs submitted every day to the grid and more than 4 million hours of CPU consumed in the last 12 months. Only three experiments on the CERN Large Hadron Collider have used more resources. Compared to particle physics, the use of resources is much less centralized as about 40 different scientifi c applications are now currently deployed on EGEE. Each of them requires an amount of CPU which ranges from a few to a few hundred CPU years. Thanks to the 20,000 processors available to the users of the biomedical virtual organization, crunching factors in the hundreds are witnessed routinely. Such performances were already achieved on supercomputers but at the cost of reservation and long delays in the access to resources. On the contrary, grid infrastructures are constantly open to the user communities. Such changes in the scale of the computing resources made continuously available to the researchers in biomedical sciences open opportunities for exploring new fi elds or changing the approach to existing challenges. In this chapter, we would like to show the potential impact of grids in the fi eld of drug discovery through the example of the WISDOM initiative

    From gridmap-file to VOMS: managing authorization in a Grid environment

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    Grids are potentially composed of several thousands of users from different institutions sharing their computing resources (or using resources provided by third parties). Controlling access to these resources is a difficult problem, as it depends on the policies of the organizations the users belong to and of the resource owners. Moreover, a simple authorization implementation, based on a direct user registration on the resources, is not applicable to a large scale environment. In this paper, we describe the solution to this problem developed in the framework of the European DataGrid [M. Draoli, G. Mascari, R. Piccinelli, Project Presentation, DataGrid-11-NOT-0103-_1] and DataTAG [http://www.datatag.org/] projects: the Virtual Organization Membership Service (VOMS) [R. Alfieri, et al., Managing Dynamic User Communities in a Grid of Autonomous Resources, TUBT005, in: Proceedings of the CHEP 2003, 2003]. VOMS allows a fine grained control of the use of the resources both to the users' organizations and to the resource owners

    Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

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    Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

    Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures

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    This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not complete, but we believe it is representative. Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap- plications by representing the infrastructures

    Towards a Swiss National Research Infrastructure

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    In this position paper we describe the current status and plans for a Swiss National Research Infrastructure. Swiss academic and research institutions are very autonomous. While being loosely coupled, they do not rely on any centralized management entities. Therefore, a coordinated national research infrastructure can only be established by federating the various resources available locally at the individual institutions. The Swiss Multi-Science Computing Grid and the Swiss Academic Compute Cloud projects serve already a large number of diverse user communities. These projects also allow us to test the operational setup of such a heterogeneous federated infrastructure

    Breaking Barriers to Renewable Energy Production in the North American Arctic

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    As climate change continues to affect our lives, the communities at the northern extremes of our world have witnessed the changes most profoundly. In the Arctic, where climate change is melting permafrost and causing major shoreline erosion, remote communities in Alaska and northern Canada are particularly vulnerable. Furthermore, these communities have limited access to electrical grids and bear oppressive energy costs relying on diesel generators. While some communities have started to incorporate renewable energy into their hamlets and villages, progress has generally been limited with the notable exception of Canada’s Northwest Territories and some coastal communities in western Alaska. During its latest stint as chair of the Arctic Council, the United States outlined community renewable energy in the Arctic as one of its primary goals. This Note focuses on regulatory and practical policy solutions to make that goal possible. It draws on examples from industrialized countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as examples from developing countries, such as India and Peru, to examine solutions for the technical, economic, regulatory, and community engagement problems that Arctic communities in Alaska face when setting up new energy projects. Additionally, this Note describes the current political structure of Alaskan villages under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and argues that Alaska Native Corporations should play a role in developing clean, cheap energy sources for their shareholders. Finally, this Note argues that public-private partnerships, like the non-profit Arctic Energy Alliance in the Northwest Territories, shows that clean, renewable energy projects for rural Arctic villages are possible throughout the Arctic. This Note draws lessons from other communities throughout the world and attempts to apply them to the unique situations that remote northern Alaska communities face regarding access to clean, renewable energy

    New science on the Open Science Grid

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    The Open Science Grid (OSG) includes work to enable new science, new scientists, and new modalities in support of computationally based research. There are frequently significant sociological and organizational changes required in transformation from the existing to the new. OSG leverages its deliverables to the large-scale physics experiment member communities to benefit new communities at all scales through activities in education, engagement, and the distributed facility. This paper gives both a brief general description and specific examples of new science enabled on the OSG. More information is available at the OSG web site: www.opensciencegrid.org
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