EGEE Newsletter July 2005
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Welcome
It’s summer at
last and the weather, over most of
EGEE News
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4th EGEE Conference Announced
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!
Departure of the Project Director
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, 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
100 Sites pass daily tests
On 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 smooth running of the 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!
Two new applications running on the EGEE infrastructure: Drug
Discovery and Earthquake Analysis
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
Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), France, were able to complete
analysis of the large Indonesian earthquake that occurred on 28 March 2005,
just 30 hours after it occurred.
For both of these applications, 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.
Globus Toolkit 4 released
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/.
gLite update
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.
Training News
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Forthcoming Training Events
For full event listings, see http://www.egee.nesc.ac.uk/shedreg/index.html.
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,
The School will be held in
Regional EGEE Summer School
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,
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:
We expect to be adding the first gLite material in the coming
months.
Developer tips for composing web services
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
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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Endnotes
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.
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, make sure you
email to ask for an access card, and arrange accommodation early as this is
likely to be a particularly well attended meeting.
If you have comments on the newsletter, or any submissions for
future issues, please contact owen.appleton@cern.ch. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the summer!