Let us introduce you to Volunteer Garage, a new website on volunteer computing, developed by the e-ScienceTalk project.  Volunteer Garage provides information on the history, nuts and bolts, middleware, and involved projects in volunteer computing with a lot of background from the developers of this groundbreaking way of raising computing power for science.  Do have a look at http://www.volunteer-computing.org/ 

Prof. Dr.-Ing. André Brinkmann from the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz received a very positive feedback for his presentation on Desktop Grids and UNICORE during the Unicore Forum Meeting on March 26, 2012.  The Unicore Forum Meeting was colocated with the EGI Community Forum, held March 26-30, 2012 in München, Germany.

Three ongoing FP7 projects - SCI-BUS, SHIWA and EDGI, organize a summer school in Budapest between 2 and 6 July 2012 to demonstrate various aspects of user support for the European Grid and Cloud infrastructures. There are already several well established Grid and Cloud infrastructures in Europe. The next issue is how to exploit these infrastructures, how to port and develop application for these infrastructures and how to extend their user communities. The main goal of this summer school is to give answers for these questions and to promote best practice examples for potential application developers and users of e-science infrastructures. More information is available at http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/summerschool2012/

The University of Westminster now successfully runs the Vina application.  The video below was prepared based on the results of AutoDock. Vina runs on the University of Westminster local Desktop Grid. The AutoDock Vina application was ported to DG by EDGI. The short video is showing possible ligands (in red) of a family 38 Mannosidase. The dockings have been produced on the University of Westminster Desktop Grid out of approximately 180,000 small molecules. The video shows the 9 best results. To create this short video approximately 1 CPU year computation was required.

Vina application
 

Oleg Lodygensky from the Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire in Orsay, Paris announced the first release of XtremWeb-HEP 8.  This version allows the deployment of virtual machines over desktop grid. The release is available at
http://www.xtremweb-hep.org/spip.php?rubrique15. The documentation is available at http://www.xtremweb-hep.org/spip.php?rubrique16 and a video tutorial at http://www.xtremweb-hep.org/spip.php?article233.

Desktop Grid resources can now be officially accessed as part of the German D-Grid infrastructure through UNICORE interfaces.  The European Desktop Grid Initiative EDGI will therefore organize a two days’ workshop from March 1st to March 2nd at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz to give an introduction on how to build up Desktop Grids and how to port applications to be used in Desktop Grids.

Outline of the programme:
Day 1 - 1st March:
- An introduction to Desktop Grids, EDGI and IDGF - presentation
- A general introduction to BOINC - presentation
- Installation of a BOINC server/client - hands-on
- Application porting to BOINC (methodology, DCI API, GenWrapper) - presentation
- Porting applications with GenWrapper - hands-on
Day 2 - 2nd March:
- Porting applications with GenWrapper cont. - questions, answers - hands-on
- User interfaces (portals and command-line options)
- The EDGI infrastructure, bridging from g-Lite/UNICORE to BOINC - presentation
- Team work, consultancy - discussing and analyzing migration options of candidate applications - hands-on
 
Attendance at the workshop is free, but the number of attendees is limited to 30 people.

You can register for this workshop at http://desktopgridfederation.org/registration13

The Technical Advisory Board of the D-Grid GmbH - the major coordination instance of grid infrastructures in Germany, partner of the German National Grid Initiative - has officially approved to allow any German computing center to provide EDGI D-Grids as a D-Grid UNICORE computing resource. Therewith effectively any German scientist can use Desktop Grid resources as the other Service Grid resources, because of the transparency of the UNICORE extension. EDGI Desktop Grids have still to be provided inside the D-Grid security environment; but this will be coming soon.

On 22 November 2011, Steven Newhouse signed a Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) on behalf of EGI with EDGI, represented by Peter Kacsuk. EDGI is deploying desktop grid (DG) and cloud services for EGI heavy user communities. The project will provide a workflow-oriented science gateway to enable easier access to the e-infrastructure and establish the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) to coordinate DG-related activities in Europe and to attract volunteer DG resource donors. With this agreement, the EDGI production infrastructure will be offered as a service for EGI and NGI user communities, “thus enabling and exploiting the possibilities lying within volunteer and institutional desktop grid computing for a wider scientific user community", according to Peter Kacsuk. At the same occasion, Peter Kacsuk also signed an MoU between EDGI and the e-ScienceTalk project, represented by Catherine Gater.

On 23 November 2011, the EDGI project will be presented in a poster at the RCUK Cybersecurity Research Showcase in London, UK.  The Research Councils UK (RCUK) has identified research into cybersecurity as a priority for its Global Uncertainties programme. This showcase event is bringing together UK academic researchers and problem owners to share information on current activities, issues and research programmes in cybersecurity.  The EDGI poster is showing how Desktop Grids and distributed networks can contribute to greater security in cyberspace.

The International Desktop Grid Federation is getting quite some exposure at SC11 in Seattle, Washington, November 12-18, 2011 at booth #2639 of the Hungarian Grid Competence Centre.  You can find the IDGF poster there.  For more explanation, IDGF-representative Robert Lovas is present at SC11 for MTA SZTAKI. MTA SZTAKI provides high level grid gateways, application porting support and turn-key solutions for grid users. As the project coordinator of several EU projects, its research and support activities focus on Desktop Grids, Clouds, and work flow interoperability.

A 1 year - renewable - position for a Post Doc is available at the INAF - Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, Sicily, Italy, to work in the HPC and Visualization Laboratory. The position is expected to start in January 2012. The applications should arrive at the Observatory no later than 9 December 2011. This post is for the SCI-BUS Project. SCI-BUS will create a generic-purpose gateway technology that will provide seamless access to major computing, data and networking infrastructures and services in Europe. DCIs represented in the project include clusters, supercomputers, Grids, Desktop Grids, academic and commercial Clouds. SCI-BUS will elaborate an application-specific gateway building technology and a customization methodology based on which user communities can easily develop their customized gateways. The framework will facilitate reuse and exchange of generic and application-specific gateway components not only among the project partners but also to other projects that use Liferay technology. The gross salary is 28,000 Euros per year that correspond to a net salary of about 1,850 Euros per month. More information is available at http://www.oact.inaf.it/weboac/concorsi_it.html under the item "Post Doc vacancy 70/11".

A 2 year position for a researcher in distributed, Grid and Cloud computing is available at the University of Wetminster London at the Centre for Parallel Computing (CPC) in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The researcher will undertake research and development within the framework of EU and UK Research Council funded projects in distributed computing infrastructure (DCI). The post arises specifically to deliver several EU FP7-funded projects. The postholder will play a key supporting role in: porting and supporting the development of scientific applications and work flows to Cloud-based DCI's; supporting research scientist end-users; and supporting, developing and enhancing the Cloud-, Grid-, multicore- and GPU-based infrastructure of the CPC. This researcher assistant position has a duration of 2 years with a fixed term contract. Closing date for application is Friday 4 November 2011. The interview date is set on Friday 25 November 2011. More information is available at http://www.wmin.ac.uk/hrvacancies/default.aspx

On Friday 23 September 2011, EDGI and VENUS-C have signed a Memorandum of Understanding at the EGI Technical Forum in Lyon, France. "As part of this new cooperation agreement with EDGI, VENUS-C will provide support and access to Cloud resources, including two Pilots recruited through the Open Call, while benefiting from EDGI support to interested users of VENUS-C. We are very excited about creating closer links with EDGI as part of a 'win-win' strategy that will generate new know-how by sharing experiences gained on both sides", stated Andrea Manieri, VENUS-C Project Director. "The partner agreement with VENUS-C is quite essential for EDGI as it will bring the Desktop Grid infrastructure into the Cloud.  VENUS-C will provide EDGI with the required Cloud resources, thus allowing EDGI to improve the Quality of Service of its production infrastructure. On the other hand, EDGI is most happy to assist VENUS-C in deploying in the Cloud images of OpenNebula with BOINC client applications. In this way, both partners will deliver best-of-class efforts to reinforce and integrate the European Cloud and Desktop Grid infrastructures", added Peter Kacsuk, EDGI Project Coordinator. 

Andrea Manieri (VENUS-C) and Peter Kacsuk (EDGI) shake hands after signing the MoU.

On Wednesday 21 September 2011, EDGI and EMI - European Middleware Initiative - have signed a Memorandum of Understanding at the EGI Technical Forum in Lyon, France. This MoU with EMI will help EDGI to support the development of 'bridge middleware' federating service grids with desktop grids. EDGI will have facilitated early access to EMI releases. The collaboration will also allow to set up an OLA between EMI and EDGI.

Alberto di Meglio (EMI) and Peter Kacsuk (EDGI) shake hands after signing the MoU.

The next EDGI project meeting will take place October 11-14, 2011 in Taormina, Sicily, Italy. The registration fee for the meeting is 110 euro.

The programme for the ninth IDGF tutorial and workshop has been finalized. The ninth IDGF tutorial and workshop is co-located with the EGI Technical Forum 2011. It will be held September 23, 2011 at the Lyon Conference Centre in Lyon, France in room Rhone I between 9h00 and 12h00. The session consists of four parts: a training session; Desktop Grids intro and IDGF overview; Infrastructure overview; and Case studies.  You are welcome to register at http://tf2011.egi.eu/registration/

The 8th IDGF Workshop will be held August 17, 2011, 14h-18h in Hannover, Germany. This workshop is organized by the International Desktop Grid Federation and by SZTAKI for the European chapter. It is co-located with the 7th BOINC Workshop that will take place on August 18-19. This workshop is focused around the Desktop Grids for eScience Roadmap - a new version has just been published - and a panel session on issues and opportunities in Desktop Grids. The workshop will provide a platform for scientific users, Desktop Grid operators, system administrators and application developers to exchange experiences about Desktop Grids and related technology. More information and a registration form are available at http://desktopgridfederation.org/8th-idgf-workshop.

Oleg Lodygensky from the Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire in Orsay, Paris announced that Version XWHEP 7.5.0 of XtremWeb-HEP has been released. This version improves security and end user experience. It supports MS Windows XP and 7 and removes Attic protocol support due to some Attic problems. More information is available at http://www.xtremweb-hep.org/spip.php?article30.

EDGI's sister project DEGISCO has released a new edition of the  Desktop Grids for eScience Road Map on July 11, 2011. The document is comprised of two parts. The first part constitutes a bird view of all the relevant topics to be considered when setting up a Desktop Grid infrastructure. This management part is addressed to political stakeholders and the general public. The second part offers a detailed and step-by-step description in five chapters of all the challenges and issues to be solved including relevant links to background information and practical examples. This technical part is aimed at Desktop Grid operators, scientific users, the academic user community, legal experts, and volunteer computing organisations. The Road map documents are available in the IDGF download section.

EDGI participated in ISC11 in Hamburg. Together with Contrail, mOSAIC, and SLA@SOI, it demonstrated  in the European Cloud Research booth. Missed it? Our partner the Contrail cloud federation project made some impressions.

Do not forget to register for the Distributed Computer Infrastructure Summerschool in July in Budapest. It featurs a complete EDGI technology day. But you learn also about DEGISCO Desktop Grids, EMI middleware and StratusLab Clouds.

An Interview at the AlmereLive channel about Desktop Grids, AlmereGrid and Contrail Cloud federation during the Future Media week in the Netherlands.

The three teams together from MTA SZTAKI (Booth #16) were awarded by the European Commission based on the votes of visitors (sponsored by ERCIM). The exhibitor team has received the Exhibit Third Price for the booth 'Future technologies to support collaborative solutions for grand challenges (Biological water safety, Augmented collaboration, e-Infrastructures for science)' by Szabolcs Tokes, Peter Galambos, Robert Lovas et al. (www.fet11.eu/awards). The exhibition had a great outcome: Three new organisations decided to join IDGF, several new volunteers joined the SZTAKI Desktop Grid project, and several new applications have been identified to be ported on the EDGI (edgi-project.eu) and DEGISCO (http://degisco.eu) infrastructures in the near future.

Simon Delamare has won the "Best Presentation Award" at the Grid'5000 Spring School 2011 in Reims, France for his presentation on SpeQuloS. The title of the presentation is Hybrid Distributed Computing Infrastructure Experiments in Grid5000: Suppor ting QoS in Desktop Grids with Cloud Resources. Congratulations to Simon Delamare and the whole EDGI JRA2 team!

Vilnius, 14 April 2011 - At the EGI User Forum, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, the EDGI project forthe first time demonstrated a brand new feature. The feature is called the MetaJob mechanism by which users are enabled to submit jobs to the EDGI Desktop Grid through gLite using one single submit command in the range of thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs or even more. This was being demonstrated in the EDGI booth with great success. The full press release is available at http://edgi-project.eu/downloads/-/document_library_display/7FkI/view/70916
 

EDGI will organize a joint DCI Summer School with EMI, IGE, EGI-Inspire, StratusLab and DEGISCO in Budapest between 11-16 July 2011. The subject of the summer school is to give insights to the technologies provided by the EMI, IGE, EDGI and StratusLab projects. Based on the EGI-InSPIRE and DEGISCO project experiences the school will also address the issues of how to organize production infrastructures based on these technologies, how to port applications for such infrastructures and how to support users of these infrastructures. More information is available at http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu/eudciss2011/

At the EGI User Forum, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, the EDGI project for the first time demonstrated a brand new feature. The feature is called the MetaJob mechanism by which users are enabled to submit jobs to the EDGI Desktop Grid through gLite using command-line tools in the range of thousands jobs, tens of thousands jobs or even more. This was being demonstrated in the EDGI booth with great success. During the day 10,000 jobs were submitted several times to show the EGI User Forum visitors, how the jobs can easily be processed by BOINC and to show the gLite users, how MetaJob can be used through glite, without disrupting the gLite infrastructure.

At the EGI User Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania, EDGI and StratusLab have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). EDGI operates a distributed computing infrastructure based on desktop computing technologies (BOINC and Xtremweb) with bridges that allow interoperation between the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) and the EDGI infrastructure. StratusLab develops and provides a comprehensive, open source cloud distribution that allows resource center administrators to deploy private and/or public clouds. The primary focus of StratusLab is to ensure that its cloud distribution is well adapted to running EGI grid services. The respective roles of StratusLab and EDGI as providers and users of cloud technologies forms a natural focal point for collaboration between the two projects.

For the attendees of the EGI UF in Vilnius, Lithuania we created a virtual document bag. But even if you are not going to Vilnius it contains useful up-to-date  information on Desktop Grids. There is a handy flyer summarizing what is happening in Vilnius. And the final  workshop programme is also available.

On March 29, 2011 the University of Westminster has issued a press release announcing its new DIY supercomputer which is saving thousands of pounds. The system uses spare PC capacity to generate calculations.  This development can help universities, pharma and health care companies save money and speed up crucial research. The Centre for Parallel Computing is a partner in EDGI. The press release is available at the website of the University of Westminster.

EDGI contributed to the Siena Road Map, published at the Cloudscape III conference in Brussels. Etienne Urbah was one of the Road Map editors, Ad Emmen presented EDGI.

EDGI also contributed a use case to the Road Map. The Road Map can be downloaded from the http://www.sienainitiative.eu/ website.

From 11 to 15 April 2011, the EGI User Forum will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania. This conference will showcase the diversity of the user community within the European Grid Infrastructure through daily plenaries, oral presentations, poster sessions and co-located workshops. The event aims to help all members of the EGI community, from end-users to application developers, operations staff and technology providers, to share their knowledge and build collaborations. On April 12th, there will be a demonstration of "Utilising Desktop Grid resources through gLite". On April 14th, EDGI assistant project coordinator Jozsef Kovacs will offer an oral presentation on "The EDGI infrastructure and its usage for the European Grid user communities". Please also note that there will be an IDGF workshop on April 14th on "Desktop Grids for scientific applications", offered by Robert Lovas and Ad Emmen. More information about the workshop is available at http://desktopgridfederation.org.

Our sister project DEGSICO has released the first version of a Desktop Grids for eScience Road Map on January 31, 2011. The document, produced for the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) is comprised of two parts. The first part constitutes a bird view of all the relevant topics to be considered when setting up a Desktop Grid infrastructure. This management part is addressed to political stakeholders and the general public. The second part offers a detailed and step-by-step description in five chapters of all the challenges and issues to be solved including relevant links to background information and practical examples. This technical part is aimed at Desktop Grid operators, scientific users, the academic user community, legal experts, and volunteer computing organisations. Read further...

Download in ODT
Download in PDF
The Road map documents are available in the IDGF download section.

Tamas Kiss during the Desktop Grid presentation at the Science Park in Amsterdam. About 30 people attended the presentation at the NIKHEF building.

Tamas Kiss will give  two presentations, one on Desktop/volunteer grid systems in support of e-science and the other on Applicability and value of desktop grids for advanced biomedical research in Amsterdam on February 3, 2010.

EDGI representatiives are participating in a concertation meeting with other Europan projects that work on infrastructures for scientists. You can follow the event on the Internet  The meeting is in the CERN Globe.

The EDGI (European Desktop Grid Initiative) project is looking for four subcontractors.

• Two subcontractors should bring in new application user communities;
• Two subcontractors as infrastructure providers.

The two infrastructure  subcontractors are expected  to extend the resources the original partners bring into the EDGI infrastructure. The  two application user communities subcontractors are expected to  extend the number of ported applications  to the EDGI infrastructure with new application domains. The selection criteria  include the size of the community using the application domain.  For more information have a look at http://edgi-project.eu/subcontractors

International Desktop Grid Federation will assist to get millions of volunteers at home donating computing time to science

Addressing European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes' vision

Amsterdam, 2010-09-15, Currently, about half a million computers from people at home contribute each day unused computing time to science. This already is a considerable contribution to scientists who need computing power to solve important problems, such as the energy crisis, the design of new drugs, and the spreading of disease. However, with more than one billion PCs in the world the computational power, available to scientists could easily be increased a hundred fold, speeding up the process of scientific discovery. The International Desktop Grid Federation, officially launched today in Amsterdam, assists in that process, by bringing together operators of and developers for Volunteer Desktop Grids. By exchanging information, providing training and support to its members, and by helping new Volunteer Desktop Grids to be started. The International Desktop Grid Federation is an initiative from the partners of the EDGI and DEGISCO projects, but meanwhile also others have joined. If people do not wish to lag behind in Desktop Grid computing, they need to join. IDGF will help the vision Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes expressed in her 14 September release: "European researchers' access to greater computing power will help them to tackle major research challenges in areas such as climate change and healthcare. The European Grid Infrastructure will help strengthen Europe's hand in research and give our scientists the support they need, whilst saving energy and cutting costs." IDGF will take care Volunteer Desktop Grids can be seamlessly integrated into the European Grid Infrastructure.

Read the complete press release (also in other languages) in http://desktopgridfederation.org/news-archive

On September 17,  EDGI, for the International Desktop Grid Federation, will organise a  Technical session: Supporting EGI user communities with Desktop Grid resources. The session will take place in Amsterdam. In the afternoon there is a Desktop Grid Tutorial.