Several IDGF members are participating and contributing to the Second London Citizen Cyberscience Summit, February 16-18, 2012. Wenjing Wu from the Institute of High Energy Physics and the Chinese Academy of Science is giving a talk on "Citizen Cyberscience in China" and Eric Yen from Academia Sinica is presenting the Quake Catcher in SE Asia during the first day. Uwe Beckert will talk about Rechenkraft during the second day and Mark McAndrew from the Charity Engine will participate in a panel discussion on Volunteer Computing. The closing presentation at the third day will be given by Ad Emmen from AlmereGrid. He will tell the audience about "Volunteer Desktop Grids help each other: the IDGF experience". Registration for this event is still possible at http://www.citizencyberscience.net/summit2/.

SAT@home BOINC project (http://sat.isa.ru/pdsat/) is aimed at solving hard problems that can be effectively reduced to the Boolean satisfiability problem. This project was implemented by two IDGF members: Institute for System Dynamics and Control Theory of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Institute for Systems Analysis of Russian Academy of Sciences. Now this project is rapidly growing. New results are regularly obtained and published on the project web page. The project already attracted a worldwide attention. For instance recently it was discussed in the SAT Blog by Mate Soos. The record is available from here: http://www.msoos.org/thoughts-on-sat-at-home.

Currently the project deals with the problem of inversion of the A5/1 generator. In the nearest future a new experiment for searching pairs and triples of orthogonal Latin squares will be launched. The results obtained with SAT@home project were presented at Cracow Grid Workshop and IT education and science conference in Moscow at the end of 2011 year. New papers are submitted to some upcoming conferences.

Author: Mikhail Posypkin

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.

Asia@home is an event co-organized by Academia Sinica Grid Computing, the Citizen Cyberscience Centre and Desktop Grids for International Scientific Collaboration (DEGISCO).

This year's Asia@home Workshop is on the topic of “Citizens and Earthquake Science”. The focus is on applications of citizen-based volunteer computing and volunteer sensing to earthquake science in South-East Asia. The purpose of the hackfest is to explore new concepts in distributed software and hardware, and brainstorm about how to increase web-based public participation in earthquake science.

The two-day workshop tackles two specific challenges:
The first day focuses on how to deploy the volunteer-based earthquake sensing project Quake Catcher Network in Taiwan and neighbouring regions of South-East Asia, such as Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam. QCN provides seismic researchers with new and unique sources of information about seismic events. It is also contributing to public awareness about earthquake science.

The second day focuses on integrating large-scale simulation packages for earthquake science with the volunteer computing platform BOINC, so that home PCs and laptops, as well as desktop grids in research institutes, may contribute to simulation-based research. Topics include volunteer cloud computing, bridging volunteer and grid resources, and services provided by the International Desktop Grdi Federation (IDGF).

Guest speakers include Prof. Jesse Lawrence, Stanford School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University.

Asia@home welcomes seismic scientists, grid and volunteer computing enthusiasts, and science education experts.

More information is available at http://event.twgrid.org/isgc2012/asiaathome.html

The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds (ISGC) 2012 will be held at Academia Sinica in Taipei, from 26 February to 2 March 2012, with co-located events and workshops. The conference is hosted by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC), Taipei, Taiwan. To enjoy the early bird discount rate, you can register before 13 January, 2012.

"Convergence, Collaboration, Innovation" is the theme of ISGC 2012. The last decade has seen the wide-scale emergence of e-Infrastructure as a critical asset for the modern e-Scientist. The emergence of large-scale research infrastructures and instruments that has produced a torrent of electronic data is forcing a generational change in the scientific process and the mechanisms used to analyse the resulting data deluge.

No longer can the processing of these vast amounts of data and production of relevant scientific results be undertaken by a single scientist. Virtual Research Communities that span organisations around the world, through an integrated digital infrastructure that connects the trust and administrative domains of multiple resource providers, have become critical in supporting these analyses.

ISGC 2012 will be the 10th meeting, that over the last decade has tracked the convergence, collaboration and innovation of individual researchers across the Asia Pacific region to a coherent community and as a result has helped drive the growth of regional e-Science activities and its collaborations around the world.

For more symposium information and detailed topic description, you can visit the conference website at http://event.twgrid.org/isgc2012/index.html

Topics of Interest include:

Applications and results from the Virtual Research Communities and Industry:
1. High Energy Physics
2. Biomedicine and Life Sciences
3. Earth Science, Environmental Changes and Natural Disaster Mitigation
4. Humanities and Social Sciences

Activity to enable the provisioning of a Resource Infrastructure:
5. Operation and Management
6. Middleware and Interoperability
7. Security and Networking
8. Infrastructure clouds and Virtualisation
9. Business Models and Sustainability

Technologies that provide access and exploitation of different site resources and infrastructures:
10. Data Management
11. Distributed Volunteer and Desktop Grid Computing
12. High Throughput Computing
13. High Performance, Manycore and GPU Computing

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".

The Ukraine IDGF member IMP, lead by Yuri Gordienko from the DEGISCO project, has won the first prize  for best poster at the Cracow Grid Workshop.

 The full title is: "From Quantity to Quality: Massive Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Nanostructures under Plastic Deformation in Desktop and Service Grid Distributed Computing Infrastructure: O. Baskova, O. Gatsenko, L. Bekenev, E. Pavlov, and Y. Gordienko."

Congratulations to the Ukraine team!

The International Desktop Grid Federation forum is alive and kicking.  Two new public forum threads have been launched: one about creating and operating institutional DG systems and a second one about surveys to collect information on DG systems. You can follow these threads at desktopgridfederation.org/forum. Any suggestion for new public threads are welcome.

In cooperation with Krajina Mriy Publishing House (Kiev, Ukraine) the team at G.V. Kurdyumov Institute for Metal Physics (IMP) of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine is glad to announce about their "SLinCA@Home Logo Contest" (please, see guidelines for the contest at the project forum), which is open for participation of any interested person, including children, pupils of secondary schools, housewives, students, etc. Deadline for submissions: 30 November, 2011.  

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

The Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) has successfully launched SAT@home. SAT@home is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to solve difficult and practically relevant problems, such as discrete functions inversion problems, discrete optimization, bioinformatics, etc., that can be effectively reduced to satisfiability (SAT). Satisfiability is the problem of determining if the variables of a given Boolean formula can be assigned in such a way as to make the formula evaluate to TRUE. Currently in the project problems of inversion of some cryptographic functions used in keystream generators are being solved. All cryptographic algorithms under investigation are publicly available. The team also plan to publish obtained results. In the nearest future the team is going to launch an experiment for solving the Quadratic Assignment problem as a SAT problem within the project. The project was implemented using DC-API. More information is available at http://sat.isa.ru/pdsat/

A successful Desktop Grid workshop was conducted on 27 until 30 September 2011 in Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) in the framework of an initiative from UPM and IDGF to promote Desktop Grid technology among Malaysian researchers and also service grid operators. The workshop started with an open seminar delivered by Dr. Robert Lovas from MTA-SZTAKI, remote presentation from Prof. Stephen C. Winter from University of Westminster, UK and Dr. Rohaya Latip from Universiti Putra Malaysia. The open seminar was attended by 52 participants and followed by a 3-day workshop with hands-ons that was attended by 23 participants. The outcome from the workshop are two desktop grid deployment plans from UPM and University of Technology Petronas (UTP) and one identified application to be ported and running on the desktop grid infrastructure from University of Technical Malaysia Melaka (UTeM).

Source: Dr. Rohaya Latip (UPM)
More info: http://idec.upm.edu.my/DesktopGrid

IDGF recently has welcomed Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) as a member organisation. This university is a wholly-owned subsidiary of PETRONAS, the national oil company of Malaysia. UTP offers a wide range of engineering and technology programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels complemented with a strong focus on Research and Development. The programmes are designed with high industry relevance to provide a dynamic learning environment. High-Performance Computing (HPC) Service Center, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, is a service center that provides computing services for high-end engineering and the physical sciences. The mission of the HPC Service Center is to develop, promote and facilitate the use of HPC environments in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) to address problems in the engineering and physical sciences fields.

The Desktop Grid middleware XtremWeb-HEP version 7.6.0 has been released by the team of the Laboratoire de l'Accelerateur Lineaire at CNRS in France. The following corrections have been made: scripts are now compatible with dash and delete data has been improved. A new feature - URI pass through - has been included. More information is available at http://www.xtremweb-hep.org/spip.php?article30

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 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.
 

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.

IDGF recently has welcomed Laurea University of Applied Sciences as a member organisation. Since 2007, the LaureaSID Networks laboratory located in Espoo, Finland has been doing applied R&D in the field of volunteer based desktop grids. These efforts ultimately led to the development of the world's largest volunteer based desktop grid for rendering 3D graphics: Renderfarm.fi. In 2011 the service was chosen to be one of the winners of the "E-science and Technology" category in the UN, Unesco and Internet Society backed World Summit Award. Laurea UAS is currently a member of the EU FP7 SCI-BUS (SCientific gateway Based User Support) project consortium, aiming - among other things - to further develop both the desktop grid based rendering of 3D graphics and any related user experience.

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.

The International Desktop Grid Federation is now in existence since one year. In this week we reached two important milestones: we now have more than 25 organisations and more than 100 persons that are member. So a lively community around Desktop Grids and related technologies is increasingly emerging. You could become member 102 if you join today.

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

The IDGF workshop at the EGI User Forum attracted 20 attendees from 7 countries by representing various existing and potential new communities as well as the funding unit from the EC. The participants learnt on Desktop Grids particularly from application developers' and users' point of view but the main strength of the workshop was the excellent presentations and testimonials from the users who have already experienced the benefits of applying Desktop Grids for eScience. The live and pre-recorded presentations included success stories from a wide range of scientific areas including (among others) material sciences from Ukraine, astrophysics from Italy, and bioinformatics from Taiwan. Beside this workshop, the IDGF members represented the DEGISCO and the EDGI projects at several other sessions in Vilnius with demonstrations, contributions to the SIENA and ERINA+ workshops as panelists, introduction to the Desktop Grid related activities at the GISELA/CHAIN workshop, and presentations in the session 'User Environments' as well. (Robert Lovas)

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.

The DEGISCO ISA RAS team - founding member of IDGF -  participated in a PAVT'2011 which is commonly recognized as a largest HPC event in Russia. The main objective of the conference - provide an opportunity to discuss the future development of parallel computing technology and the results obtained by leading research groups in HPC. Conference topics cover all aspects of high performance computing in science and technology, including applications, hardware and software, specialized languages and packages. The talk Increasing computing power of distributed systems by grids of PCs given by ISA RAS received much attention and resulted in an interesting and fruitful discussion. The usual ISA RAS tutorial on desktop grids collected five attendees which gave high marks to the tutors and appreciated the training. http://agora.guru.ru/display.php?conf=pavt2011

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.

The slides from the presentations of the 6th IDGF tutorial in Taiwain are now available. So if you want to learn about the latest developments in Desktop Grids, check them out.

The seventh IDGF tutorial is scheduled for April 14th, 2011 at the EGI User Forum in Vilnius.  Robert Lovas and Ad Emmen will address the topic of  "Desktop Grids for scientific applications". Desktop Grids only function optimally when fully integrated into the (European) e-Infrastructure. Hence, it is important to offer to current EGI users and administrators the possibility to get to know this technology and to meet with experts that could help them.  The workshop will be organised by the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) with support from the EDGI project and provides an important opportunity to further develop the Desktop Grid community inside EGI. More information about the programme is available at http://desktopgridfederation.org/programme7.  Please also note that the EDGI and DEGISCO projects will be very visible at the EGI User Forum in the form of an EDGI demonstration and two presentations, one for each project, on April 14th.  For more info, you can visit the EDGI and  DEGISCO project websites.

The main goal of the sixth IDGF tutorial is to provide an introduction into Desktop Grid computing, deployment of Desktop Grids, application development for the infrastructure, and connecting Desktop Grids to other scientific working environments, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) or EUAsiaGrid. The detailed programme can be found at http://desktopgridfederation.org/programme6

You are welcome to register for this tutorial at http://event.twgrid.org/isgc2011/registration.html

Owing to the fervent supporters IDGF member and DEGISCO partner G.V. Kurdyumov Institute for Metal Physics (IMP) improved its SLinCA@Home work and reached the remarkable level of >1 Tflop/s (>500 active PCs), despite the alpha-testing status of the SLinCA@Home project (limited server hardware, nonlinear chronometry of progress, long workunits up to 4-5 hours, absence of stable checkpointing - at the moment, some temporal hardships with stability of application versions, etc.). In short: IMP accelerated its work by more than 40-50 times in comparison to the annual plan and got production results at the alpha-testing stage even. Thanks to all for this 'nano'-scale, but very important step! It is not truly 'public' yet (project-related wiki and other docs are still under construction), but IMP will try to reach this level as soon as possible.

The International Symposium on Grids and Clouds in Taiwain has an extended  deadline at Jan 7. There is a session on Distributed Desktop Grids. http://event.twgrid.org/isgc2011/

An IDGF  tutorial has been organised by DEGISCO  at DICR2010 in Novosibirsk  (http://conf.nsc.ru/dicr2010) –  the largest conference in eastern Russia on parallel and distributed computing. Also a  plenary lecture “Increasing computing power of distributed systems by grids of PCs”  was given by Vladimir Voloshinov (ISA RAS). It  addressed the role of desktop grids in scientific computing and outlined EDGeS technologies for achieving interoperability among different types of grids. Tutorial was given  by Oleg Sukhoroslov and Nickolay Khrapov (ISA RAS).

The next IDGF tutorial is going to be held in Moscow (co-located with Modern Information technology and IT-education Conference http://2010.it-edu.ru). The training will be held on Wednesday, Nov 10 at Moscow State University.  You can download the announcement in Russian.)

The International Desktop Grid Federation and DEGISCO project were presented at Softool (  – the  largest IT Exhibition in Russia. Established in 1990 Softool is now the most influential Russian show on IT & Computers. Traditionally this exhibition attracts a large number of IT specialists from all Russia and CIS. According to collected statistics 60% of visitors are directors, chief engineers of large and medium enterprises, representatives of Russian business from all over the country, and government groups. International Desktop Grid Federation and DEGISCO were presented as a part of ISA RAS (DEGISCO partner from Russia)  booth. Visitors could learn the latest achievements about the cost-efficient and green IT infrastructure promoted and supported by the IDGF members worldwide.

IDGF member and DEGISCO partner Yuri Gordienko did receive the second best poster award at the 10th Cracow Grid workshop for the paper he and his team wrote entitled Simulation of City Population Dynamics and Sustainable Growth in Desktop Grid Distributed Computing Infrastructure.

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

We did invite the press to our media event: Media event and press tour 15 September Amsterdam, 12:30 Beurs van Berlage, Damrak International computing infrastructures ready to tackle the big scientific issues facing us today. Check out the full invitation at:

http://desktopgridfederation.org/documentation

and feel free to register if you think it is useful for you.

The registration is open for the 2nd IDGF Tutorial - Using Desktop Grids in an eScience environment . It will be held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (co-located with the EGI Technical Forum) on September 17. More information: http://desktopgridfederation.org/2nd-idgf-tutorial