A Turkish Delight
Thu 2 Oct 2008
Last week EGEE brought its fifth annual conference to the city where Europe and Asia meet, Istanbul. In a city which has known many names and is influenced by many cultures it was the perfect atmosphere for the collaboration to take stock of the previous 12 months and plan the next 12.
Held within the Harbiye Askeri museum just minutes from the famous Taksim square the conference was extremely busy with almost 100 sessions covering every single aspect of EGEE. For the UK and Ireland federation EGEE 08 was also a chance to show a united front as Grids in Europe move into the era of the National Grid Initiative. Some of the partners in the UKI had worked together in a smaller way at the User Forum in Clermont Ferrand but in Istanbul it was decided that all UK affiliated organisations should have one big presence and showcase the work being done in the region. The outcome was a stand in the exhibition area presenting work from GridPP, NGS, OMII UK, Grid-Ireland and NeSC, a new logo for the federation and some very fetching t-shirts.
After last years success with the business track Trust IT, one of EGEE's business partners, organised 6 individual sessions about Grids and Industry; from business models to computing models. There was of course the “at the coal face” sessions with applications, training, monitoring, security and much more having focussed discussions. There was even a couple of sessions from the dissemination arm of the project which were even able to persuade a journalist from The Economist to come speak.
The conference was able to attract some other great speakers for the plenary sessions with Peter Vosshall from Amazon and Peter Coveney from UCL in London being two of the highlights but there were also some great plenary talks from EGEE internal people like Oliver Keeble from SA3 and Bob Jones the project director.
EGEE'08 in Istanbul was the perfect showcase of the strength in depth of the collaboration. It is no longer about just Grid technology, almost every academic discipline is supported by EGEE, industry is interested in not only the infrastructure but also the methods and people. In the last 4 and a half years EGEE has become the world's largest multidisciplinary Grid and it can only get better.
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