New pig disease in Hungary: postweaning multisystemic wasting syndrome caused by circovirus (Short Communication)

Postweaning multisystemic wasting syndrome (PMWS), a new disease in Hungary, was recognized in a swine herd located in Southeast Hungary, during the early winter of 1999. The first clinical signs of paleness, anaemia, and leanness appeared immediately after weaning, at the age of 40-50 days. Pustules were frequently observed on the skin of the trunk, and signs of necrotic dermatitis were also visible. A syndrome of poor growth and wasting was characteristic of the affected pigs. A porcine circovirus (PCV), the suspected causative agent, was detected by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Sequencing data and restriction endonuclease (RE) analysis of the PCR products suggested that the virus belonged to the PCV-II group where all the causative agents of PMWS are also grouped

Legacy Code Repository with Broker-based Job Execution

This paper describes how GEMLCA has been ported to the LCG/g-Lite based EGEE infrastructure. Besides simply porting GEMLCA to another middleware it had to be made capable to interact with the EGEE broker solution. A legacy code can not only be selected from the repository, but using its legacy code interface description it is also defined which resources are capable to execute the given code. Based on this information the broker can find the most suitable resource at workflow execution

Decentralised Repositories for Transparent and Efficient Virtual Machine Operations: Architecture of the ENTICE Project

ENTICE is an H2020 European project aiming to research and create a novel Virtual Machine (VM) repository and operational environment for federated Cloud infrastructures to: (i) simplify the creation of lightweight and highly optimised VM images tuned for functional descriptions of applications; (ii) automatically decompose and distribute VM images based on multi-objective optimisation (performance, economic costs, storage size, and QoS needs) and a knowledge base and reasoning infrastructure to meet application runtime requirements; and (iii) elastically auto-scale applications on Cloud resources based on their fluctuating load with optimised VM interoperability across Cloud infrastructures and without provider lock-in, in order to finally fulfil the promises that virtualization technology has failed to deliver so far. In this chapter, we give an inside view into the ENTICE project architecture. Based on stakeholders that interact with ENTICE, we describe the different functionalities of the different components and services and how they interact with each other

Application of polymerase chain reaction and virus isolation techniques for the detection of viruses in aborted and newborn foals

The occurrence of two important pathogens, equine herpesvirus 1 (EHV1) and equine arteritis virus (EAV) causing abortions, perinatal foal mortality and respiratory disease, was investigated by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and virus isolation to demonstrate the presence of abortigenic viruses in samples from 248 horse fetuses in Hungary. We found 26 EHV1- and 4 EAV-positive aborted or prematurely born foals from 16 and 4 outbreaks, respectively, proving that despite the widely applied vaccination, EHV1 is a far more important cause of abortions in the studs than EAV. We compared the virus content of different organs of the fetuses by PCR and isolation to identify the organ most suitable for virus demonstration. Our investigations indicate that the quantity of both viruses is highest in the lungs; therefore, according to our observations, in positive cases the probability of detection is highest from lung samples of aborted or newborn foals. Both the PCR and the virus isolation results revealed that the liver, though widely used, is not the best organ to sample either for EHV1 or for EAV detection. From the analysis of the epidemiological data, we tried to estimate the importance of the two viruses in the Hungarian horse population

Hidden access mechanism for demonstrating and teaching Grid

There is a large number of legacy code applications that require a lot of resources, such as compute and storage resources. Grid computing is able to provide these resources for legacy applications but they cannot be executed on the Grid without either re-engineering or converting these codes into Grid services. One of the solutions to gridify these codes is the Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Applications (GEMLCA) that ports legacy codes into Grid services without code re-engineering and with minimum user effort using the P-GRADE portal to provide a user-friendly environment. Access to Grid environments, among others to GEMLCA, requires registration and/or certificate, which some users may not have. They raise several problems towards demonstration and learning environments, such as access control and security issues. The GEMLCA team developed the concept of a Grid demonstration and teaching environment, which includes the GEMLCA Demonstration Environment (GDE) and the GEMLCA Learning Environment (GLE) to fulfil the above objective. GDE allows non-registered users to check the GEMLCA functionality and learn how to use it not having a registration or even a valid certificate using an account pool and a certificate pool. This environment gives a limited access to GEMLCA and Grid resources through quota and lifetime control. GLE, which is built on GDE, supports running tutorials of Grid courses and seminars

Legacy code support for production Grids. (CoreGrid technical report TR 0011.)

In order to improve reliability and to deal with the high complexity of existing middleware solutions, todays production Grid systems restrict the services to be deployed on their resources. On the other hand end-users require a wide range of value added services to fully utilize these resources. This paper describes a solution how legacy code support is offered as third party service for production Grids. The introduced solution, based on the Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Architecture (GEMLCA), do not require the deployment of additional applications on the Grid resources, or any extra effort from Grid system administrators. The implemented solution was successfully connected to and demonstrated on the UK National Grid Service