Report from GridAsia2007 - Neil Gemmell

From BeSTGRID

Both talks seem to have been well received and there is considerable interest in what we've achieved to date.

I've spent quite a bit of time with the Australians: David Bannon, Greg Wickham, Andrew Rohl, and I seem to have convinced them to give Evo a try as they are under whelmed with their Access Grid experiences.

Speaking of Access Grid, there is apparently a new version of Vic developed by the VisLab at UQ, that incorporates DV and HDV capability that maybe worth looking at.

Other opportunities and offers to help. Fang-Pang Lin from Taiwan has again been very friendly and has offered to help us where he can. The Taiwan grid that he is associated with has tie in to the GLEON (Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network) that has some NZ tie in with David Hamilton at Waikato. It may be smart for us to talk to David/Fang-Pang at some point and see about rolling out some GLEON resource on BeSTGRID as another low hanging fruit c.f. NEES.

Yoshio Tanaka. PRAGMA update. The pragma folk have begun to roll out Gfarms with the CAMERA data sets at a variety of different sites. Again this might be something that we may wish to pursue.

Carole Goble, mygrid.org.uk and myexperiment.org.uk. The main point of this talk was to recognise the new ways people interact with computation resources to build/chose workflows. The focus was on myGrid, a suite of components designed to support in silico science, encompassing workflow design and execution, data and metadata management and provenance collection, and myexperiment a physical setting not unlike myspace.com in which people document their experimental design and workflow choices. Struck me that there was some overlap with elements of Sakai and I think this might be worth looking at and may present an interesting opportunity to engage early in the social experiment that they are running on these web based portals.

Many other grid developments seem to using the same broad approach that we have adopted. The exemplar projects are almost identical (bioinformatics, high energy physics etc.) and the shared experiences are much the same. At one level this is very encouraging and comforting, but at another we have little key points of difference to those other projects and consequently our approach looks a bit derivative.

Neil Gemmell