News-blog

Registration now open for 8th IDGF Workshop

2011-07-22T14:29:04Z

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.

New edition of Desktop Grids for eScience Road Map now available

2011-07-13T10:09:10Z

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 welcomes Renderfarm.fi and Laurea University of Applied Sciences as member organisation

2011-07-08T12:35:48Z

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.

Register for the DCI Summerschool

2011-06-03T11:35:02Z

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.

It is IDGF party time: 100 persons and 25 organisations now member

2011-05-19T08:28:25Z

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.

Desktop Grids at interview during Dutch Future Media Week

2011-05-17T12:43:33Z

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

IDGF demonstrations at the award-winner booth of MTA SZTAKI at FET11

2011-05-11T06:25:48Z

The thousand visitors to the The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition (FET11) that was held last week in Budapest, could see a robot reading IDGF information. His actual work on the award winning MTA SZTAKI booth (Exhibit third prize) was demonstrating some key SZTAKI technologies in collaboration in augmented reality, water safety, digital watermarking app for Facebook and e-Infrastructures for science.

Whether robot will actually become member of IDGF is not known yet, however, several organisations did express interest in volunteer desktop grid computing and start working on donating computing time or porting applications.

Robert's robot looking at what to do with his idle processor time from Desktop Grid Federation on Vimeo.

Desktop Grids at the EGI User Forum

2011-04-22T09:52:11Z

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)

Register now for the Joint European DCI Summer School

2011-04-14T09:50:59Z

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/

EDGI submits 10,000 jobs to Desktop Grid at EGI User Forum

2011-04-13T16:38:38Z

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.

Desktop Grids at Russian HPC conference

2011-04-12T16:22:26Z

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

Desktop Grids at EGI UF in Vilnius final programme available

2011-04-08T09:11:58Z

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.

Slides Tapei tutorial available

2011-03-28T15:57:01Z

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.

Sign up for our 7th IDGF tutorial, colocated with the EGI User Forum in Vilnius

2011-03-10T13:51:30Z

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.

Register now for the 6th IDGF Tutorial taking place March 21 at ISGC 2011 in Taipei

2011-03-09T15:33:03Z

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

The next milestone for SLinCA@Home: peak performance > 1 Tflop/s

2011-03-02T10:21:48Z

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.

Call for Paper for the ISGC 2011 and OGF 31 extended to Jan 7

2011-01-04T10:41:17Z

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/

IDGF Tutorial in Novosibirsk

2010-12-05T20:06:25Z

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).

IDGF Tutorial in Moscow

2010-11-07T08:39:43Z

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.)

Desktop Grids at Softool in Russia

2010-11-03T09:50:18Z

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.