Andrew Lewis and Timothy Carr from UCT accompanied by Dr Bruce Becker
attended the 5th and final EGEE User Forum in Uppsala, Sweden. It was a great
opportunity to meet other Grid users and project coordinators and we
made some very useful contacts. It was also fun to meet up with some of
the people we'd been working with in Europe for the past year. The key theme
from the conference was one of more collaboration in order to avoid
duplication of effort, especially in the MPI and portal domains.
It took a while to get used to the weather, frequently well below zero
with occasional light snow. As it was the last EGEE forum (the project
phase is now closing and it will now be EGI) the coordinators decided to
make it a memorable event and on Tuesday night we enjoyed a spectacular
dinner in Uppsala Castle. Over the course of the forum the South African delegates attended discussions in bioinformatics, Earth observation, scientific gateways and portals, computational chemistry, high energy physics, parallel processing and MPI architecture. Dr Bruce Becker gave a very well received talk on the South African National Grid in the Regional Projects session. Two windfalls to come out of the forum were the implementation of gqsub (a qsub like wrapper for gLite developed by a Scottish University) and a graphical monitoring tool for the grid using Google Earth.
Unfortunately on the 2nd last day of the conference ash from the
Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull shut down air traffic over Europe and
we found ourselves stranded indefinitely in Sweden. Luckily we had not
booked out of our hotel yet, or found ourselves stuck in the 'departure
hall limbo' as so many unfortunate travelers did. The Swedish home
affairs were extremely helpful and granted us temporary residency. We
took full advantage of the situation and visited the HPC data center at Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science (UPPMAX), went on a brief visit to Stockholm and a walking tour of a
Viking village at Gamla Uppsala. We also visited the spectacular Uppsala
University Museum housing a collection of Viking and Egyptian exhibits,
a huge display dedicated to Carl Linnaeus as well as first editions of
Newton's Principia and Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius.
On the 2nd Friday we took a chance and managed to wangle our way onto an
aircraft heading for Doha. 48 hours later we were back in SA to find
that our director had kindly given us the Monday off in consolation for
all our hardships ;-)
It took a while to get used to the weather, frequently well below zero
with occasional light snow. As it was the last EGEE forum (the project
phase is now closing and it will now be EGI) the coordinators decided to
make it a memorable event and on Tuesday night we enjoyed a spectacular
dinner in Uppsala Castle. Over the course of the forum the South African delegates attended discussions in bioinformatics, Earth observation, scientific gateways and portals, computational chemistry, high energy physics, parallel processing and MPI architecture. Dr Bruce Becker gave a very well received talk on the South African National Grid in the Regional Projects session. Two windfalls to come out of the forum were the implementation of gqsub (a qsub like wrapper for gLite developed by a Scottish University) and a graphical monitoring tool for the grid using Google Earth.
Unfortunately on the 2nd last day of the conference ash from the
Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull shut down air traffic over Europe and
we found ourselves stranded indefinitely in Sweden. Luckily we had not
booked out of our hotel yet, or found ourselves stuck in the 'departure
hall limbo' as so many unfortunate travelers did. The Swedish home
affairs were extremely helpful and granted us temporary residency. We
took full advantage of the situation and visited the HPC data center at Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science (UPPMAX), went on a brief visit to Stockholm and a walking tour of a
Viking village at Gamla Uppsala. We also visited the spectacular Uppsala
University Museum housing a collection of Viking and Egyptian exhibits,
a huge display dedicated to Carl Linnaeus as well as first editions of
Newton's Principia and Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius.
On the 2nd Friday we took a chance and managed to wangle our way onto an
aircraft heading for Doha. 48 hours later we were back in SA to find
that our director had kindly given us the Monday off in consolation for
all our hardships ;-)